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The Life That Became a Fool
These are the facts
that frightened me: a certainty
that was helplessness, a resignation
that was panic, not because this was the end
of my life, but because no attention to necessity,
no obedience to the urges
with which I invented myself, ever accomplished
as much as that mockery of it:
an ovation of papers
fluttering around the office
which, with their sudden meaninglessness,
quietly made a fool of my life.
The disaster itself—
the plane that scissored through
the building, the stench of fuel
so thick I tried to savor it—
were nothing
to my more local circumstance,
my chance to choose
a final tactic, to jump
or to burn, to know how it would end,
already removed from my life
but, for the moment, still living, a terror
in which I nearly managed to accept
my death when, standing at the ledge
of a blown-out window, knowing what I had
to do, I almost considered the beauty
of the morning, its tawdry consolation
for waking me out of my life,
and then my body, my adversary,
merely a way out now, a tossed package
falling, an expiration.
© 2000 by Gianmarc Manzione
