We’re told that life, it can be a wedding or a funeral, happy or melancholy, just depends if we act like mourners or celebrants, it’s our choice, whether we dab away tears of joy or shed ones of grief, responsibility for our happiness, we’re told in podcasts and internet articles and by subliminal suggestion, is entirely ours, regardless of the colossal forces, the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics, the self-corrections of the market, that shape and direct our lives, that hurl us through a worrying present toward a future we already regret, tumors on eyes and nose and mouth and shadows congealing into a dark mass, a Jew lying on the ground, beaten to the point of death.
Note: “Cancer Jew” is a Dutch anti-Semitic slur.
Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.