There Can Be No Retreat

Coward that I might be, I consider
the possibility of retreating from the
complexity of this great global market,
this world wide web of competing interests,
into a sort of Thoreau, Luddite, Unabomber existence,
looking for the unsullied purity of primitivism.

I might consider this retreat
except that it would be an inadequate cosmology;
it would be Galileo under house arrest.
It would be Einstein’s cosmological constant.

A butterfly working for fifteen cents an hour in China
causes a thunderstorm in New York.
These are the chaos patterns of fractal reality
that frustrate me. “Life should be simple,” I think
and, of course, I am wrong.

It’s a nostalgia for something that never existed.
The ‘good ole’ days’ when life was uncomplicated
are the fabrications of an unreliable memory.
One might as well try to live in a Thomas Kincaid painting.

The African mother dying of AIDs, the sex-trade boys in Bangkok,
the last of the Australian Aborigines, the Palestinian, the Persian, the Turk…

We’re all connected by innumerable,
invisible threads of causality.

I am my brothersister’s keeper.