Everything starts today. If renewal were easy,
we’d all begin again. We’d drop our endless searching
for four-leaf clovers that declare us topped up
with good luck. Our efforts at self-improvement
failed; our social justice initiative broke down.
The world’s pain never stops calling us. Again,
over and over and over: help. If the fixes were quick,
we wouldn’t have participation ribbons. There’s blood
wherever you look. Cleaning up comes after.
Ken Victor is a sinistral, Ashkenazi, cisman hetero-boomer American-Canadian Springsteen fan who hopes his poetry doesn’t depend on those markers/identifiers/descriptors, but maybe that can’t be avoided. Or can it? He’s the author of the collection We Were Like Everyone Else (Cormorant Books, 2019).
