The Past Is a Viper, the Future a Sniper

Those of you who have followed Poets & Suicides since its humble beginnings are aware that The Author has been no stranger to apocalypse scenarios. In fact, dear (non)reader, The Author has penned a number of tales that revel in human folly and myopia, exploring varieties of species-razing horror with a glee normally reserved for amusement parks and birthday parties. But now that the excellently named COVID-19 has swept disinterestedly across the face of our sad and carbon-choked planet, The Author finds the apocalypse a little less funny, and should The Author himself or his immediate family fall prey to the virus, one imagines it will become less funny still. Nietzsche suggested that “It is the thought of suicide that is a source of great comfort.” It is a thought that permits an imagined end to our seemingly bottomless pain. Still, drive in the middle of the night, while your children are sleeping soundly in rooms palely lit by glowing faerie lights, to a bridge that spans the Hudson River, park at the base of a stony outcropping into which one of the bridge’s great steel support stanchions has been anchored, walk in a daze out to the bridge’s center and haul yourself over the first railing to stand trembling on the thin outer walkway as the wind delivers the ever-screaming voices of those who have previously made this peregrination, stare down at the whitecaps aglow with moonlight and feel the vertigo swimming in your belly and realize that all you need to do now is pull yourself over that waist-high barrier and fall through space-time to arrive at the unyielding surface of forever, and then finally surrender this dream and drop to your ass sobbing, your cries muted the moment they leave your mouth by a natural world determined to silence your pathetic misery, and then finally limp back toward your automobile and fold the suicide note into a tiny square that you stuff within the back pocket of your jeans to be rediscovered later as if it were some ancient cuneiform containing the true name of God, and suddenly the thought of suicide is a lot less comforting. This is the way in which Authorial thoughts on the apocalypse have ceased to amuse or gratify. The unyielding surface of forever, it turns out, is a moveable membrane, and now it’s all up in your face.

This is further complicated by the fact that The Author’s long-awaited (by you, [non]reader) novel, ANTHROPICA, continues to wallow in the limbo of the COVID-19 pseudo-apocalypse. Will it truly be released September 1st by Animal Riot Press, formerly known as Dead Rabbits Books (before being forced to abandon this moniker by The Dead Rabbit bar-and-grill, whose overpriced cocktails and apocryphal origin story have left countless Manhattan tourists deeply unsatisfied) as promised in The Author’s likely meaningless contract? Or will the book itself fade into the matrix it describes, a world sustained by human desire and beholden to nothing other than its own self-generating fractal? Is there any place in our national pantheon for a book detailing one variety of apocalypse while its potential (non)readers experience a different variety of apocalypse? These are big questions, (non)reader, and they haunt The Author, who has not stepped out into the real or proverbial sunshine in weeks or months or years (time being rendered meaningless by the mighty COVID-19).

It is a sad time to be a human being. But this sadness has been with us always. It is only now, when the sadness cannot be folded into a tiny square and stuffed into the back pocket of our jeans, when the wind is no longer screaming in regret but in invitation, when the words are no longer able to conceal their own intent, that we must face the object of our desire-fear. The past is a viper, the future a sniper… but it’s the present tense, in its shimmery mirage-like non-existence, that we must endure now, and now, and now. Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.