Ten a.m.—must be the first
Tuesday of the month: time
to test every emergency
siren, all at once. I wonder,
Has someone determined
that Ten a.m. on Tuesday
is the least likely time for an
actual disaster? Is it just
too soon in the week
for the great apes
and the lions to escape?
Too early in the day perhaps,
to incur the rage and mania
of a battered mother
nature? Am I really so sure
that I'm sitting too far west
to finally anger Zeus
into reanimating the Gorgons
for having picked the wrong
religion all along? (Although,
would that one really
be so bad, anyway? To be
stone-still, to be spared all this,
and to last?) Just ten or so
more seconds to go now—until
the shrill whistles finish blaring
their counterfactual bulletins
of Warning, Warning, Warning;
This Is Your Imminent
Emergency Warning
That There Currently Is No Such
Imminent Emergency.
And then: on a dime at
one minute after—that feeling,
not of relief, but of something
which is nothing,
something which it seems like I've
only been rehearsing feeling,
something I can't quite
put our finger on—I can
only say for sure that it must be
a feeling I feel routinely
relieved to have failed
to feel for real.
