I am asking you to stop

Whatever you’re doing, it’s not working.
Digging holes in your neighbors’ backyard
under moonlight to bury bundles of hate mail, dialing
number stations and reading back what you overheard
at the coffee shop in the grocery store is just making
people nervous. Standing at the intersection holding 
placards decorated with hashtags, swimming laps with plastic 
models of children held on your shoulders above the waterline, 
shopping for small batch brews and then redistributing them
among your neighbors like preserves of a fruit no one ever believed 
should be preserved hasn’t persuaded anyone; you’re making
yourself a pariah at bus pickup.

Have you seen any birds lately? Have you seen
any? And what about the deer? Time was, I’d be driving
in the early morning, some back road and they’d bound out
from the vegetation along the road, and I’d stop my car
and just sit there and watch them. My friend Karen,
her backyard is so full of them, they’re likely to be declared a nuisance
animal. And every one of them with the wasting disease, hanging around
like they want us to see. Maybe that’s why no one is making new zombie
movies. They’re already here. Just look between the blinds and 
you’ll see them.

They’re planting lemon trees in rows where before
old women had planted tears. They’re publishing confessions extracted 
in basements from otherwise likeable people who couldn’t
imagine their fingers in those pliers. They’re hammering nails
into boards to hang at every crossroads, signs of your face
of the worst day of your life. They don’t mean to seem overconfident;
they know how quickly things can change. But they’re feeling
good. Look around at what they’ve already done! They’re 
slaughtering cows to convenience. They’re embroidering
entrails into a flag that stretches on and on, long 
enough to wrap us all in a burial shroud. They’re shouting
a question for every answer, detonating corrosive dynamite for every 
roadblock that proved durable till it didn’t. They pretend 
they wouldn’t have done anything
different. They know what they know now
is the same as not knowing.

The old people taught us knowledge was contained in these great urns,
something Greco-Roman or maybe Sumerian in origin, and
who cares what broke as long as you got what’s inside. You didn’t
understand, the lesson was the runes carved on the jars.
You broke it, and ever since, whatever you’ve been doing
isn’t working.

MATT DUBE

Matt Dube’s poems have appeared in Minute Magazine, Rattle, Interstice, and elsewhere. He teaches at a small mid-Missouri university and sometimes stands on the edge of the road or walks down the middle of it, alone or in a crowd, carrying a placard covered with words no one reads.