Come, let us be friends, you and I,
     E’en though the world doth hate at this hour;
Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high 
     That war cannot dim it with all its armed power. 

Come, let us be friends, you and I,
     The world hath her surplus of hatred today; 
She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh,
     Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away. 

Come, let us be friends, you and I, 
     And love each other so deep and so well, 
That the world may grow steady and forward fly,
     Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell. 

Still they ask in podcast
and electronic ink: How are you doing?

And they keep you in their hearts, pump you
to their minds, circulate you unimagined.

Take all the space you need, they say, 
empathy loves the damaged.

You offer no solutions. Only clarity
they don’t believe, only they
get to tell the future
what to be.

Then they pump you
into their viscera, and feel you
bilious, ineffable, cast iron, butterfly.

Their questions like a shovel
that doesn’t know what earth is,
but digging anyway.

They hope you would say:
“I am multigenerational
and can fracture natural
bonds in my DNA,”

for this they can sell
to a tycoon press, a Carnegie
of thought dissemination.

And your answer comes:
“Things are a seasickness
and no land in sight.

Your peeping is no witness.”