A Hard Zero to Swallow

These poems are a sequel to a previous collection titled Painted Toes and Other Mistakes, which was begun in the spring of 2020. Having since then become an octogenarian, I greet each day with gratitude for being alive, and for the privilege of reflecting on completion of the principal goals I set for myself as a young man. I could die tomorrow and count myself the luckiest man in one of the most fortunate generations the world has known. On the other hand, I cry easily at the thought of a future I shall never know, the host of friends and loved ones who have disappeared into the big nothing forever, the descent of a country I have come to love into authoritarianism, riven by a counter-revolution against the social liberation that bloomed in the 1960s, the magical decade of my youth. My gratefulness for that good fortune is shadowed now by sadness, and by hope for the young in my wake to distill honey from the bitter fruit we have left them; to somehow guide our species through this toxic crockpot toward a political wisdom commensurate with our scientific genius-a task which I hope these poems, through humor, rage, and lunacy, can lend some feeble succor.