The Shape of Jazz To Come

Is war coming? Are we headed for another crazy cataclysm? My sons, draft age. Only now can I appreciate the pain so sharp it drains the color from one's eyes, your reason for living gone in a spasm of violence to be forgotten never by survivors. This fear could become real as no movie is surreal enough to distract attention from the certainty you did not do enough to deflect man's trajectory. All could be well in the end but history portends a periodic bloodletting followed by a quietus without mercy. What's the best that can be said: he died beside his friends and buddies. Steady on to your own inquest and rest. A perfect rest that improves upon the inadequacy of your efforts. What solace can be found in the remains of marriage. So you better fight back now even if that means war comes sooner. At least you're fighting back, but how? Take a minute to meditate on purpose. Science cannot save you, neither can religion. Abstaining from violence with love, letting prisoners go, detaining no one at the border, inviting Chinese and Russian scientists to our shores, defusing your own anger before it detonates, none may be enough to save your sons. A war president needs war, whatever. A trained and deadly warfighter. You become what history wants you to become. You survive if you're lucky, if not so what, your old parents will be alive only briefly to mourn. Then they too go to their good graves and the pain dies down. In the meantime a new generation builds a new space station. Since the vortex will be sucking up the poor, let's not let the rich escape untouched. All go down together, no one hoards gold or gets away with fiction. If we have to fight let's make sure we fight as one, the sons of the rich side by side with the poor's sons and their daughters. You want slaughter? Then let every city and back road know the new order. I would rather watch Lalaland ten times over than have to write this poem. I can leave home and live in a tent or bunkhouse, eat dinner out of a tin cup and drink water from a wooden bowl, give up music and most of my memories to save my sons, to save the world and avoid this war. But that rarely happens. One is lost and found in what happens.