What can I do?
What should I do?
What is any good anymore?

You can sit there in alcohol, forgetting yourself and your cares
maybe
for a moment
Or maybe you start bawling and flummox by yourself on the wooden floor, which is very nice; hardwood floors are the best, no comparison.

You can write essays poems and/or stories that no one reads, that you don’t even reread, except maybe once or twice to make a few desperate edits. A hopeless, desperate, lurching-while-collapsing project.

You can go take a walk in the rain, which serves you right.

You can call a friend, if there are any left in the general slaughter.

You can go buy cigarettes and try killing yourself that way.

You can read a book if you can open one.

You can watch a movie if you can pick one.

You can find a wife if you go back in time and start over from innocent and with-prospects,

You can ask God to help you, but God’s been blowing you off since forever now.

You can ask God to forgive you, but you can’t believe in your own sin since forever now.

You can ask God to help the country, but why didn’t he help Russia or the Iroquois Confederacy?

You can seek wisdom, but you’re broken over your own gut and want to go home and drink by yourself and so why lie?

Wisdom, the wise rest on impermanence and interdependence, we love the Lord our God with all our soul and heart and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves, we

What to do when you can’t seem to help yourself or anyone, when the sands are rushing through the narrowing and the white-collared clerk is impatiently drumming his metal desk with big eyes behind giant round glasses, which he from time to time pushes further into his pasty face — not to keep the glasses from falling off, but just to remind you that he is a clerk and he does not have all day — ?