the doctor wants to know why you’re angry.
you shrug.
the bees are dying.
and that just doesn’t seem fair.
she informs you that anger is a “secondary emotion.”
that what you really are is sad,
or guilty,
or deeply, desperately afraid.
you dismiss,
but not six months later
her diagnosis erupts at midnight
behind a locked bathroom door.
you weep,
remembering how many different ways there are for every good thing to end.
you retreat,
reluctantly back to her white coat hoping
she will possess no righteous satisfaction
from your suffering and squirms
you,
and your paralyzing proclivities for foreverness.
so she finds you an article on the little band of scientists valiantly saving the bees.
you follow their movement with a pounding heart.
do the scientists feel that same desperate naivety?
as saving their fuzzy, anthophilic lineage
will save the ecosystem from encroaching collapse.
as if somehow just the act of trying is enough
because it means believing in the future;
means believing there will be a future for which it is worth saving anything at all.
so when you see the news out of the corner of your eye
and it’s like jump-cut flickers of the apocalypse,
how it comforting it is to imagine that when it all goes down in flames,
the legacy of the witless human race
will be a trillion echoes buzzing through the galaxy
insisting at least they saved the bees.