Muster Point

Something's amiss; we gather at the muster point, wondering if there's truly such a thing as false alarm.

We gather at the steeled sign, green, silent, nerveless, vigilant like a gaslight of old, waiting to be called upon to dimly light darkened times;

muster points, boldly planted on corners seeming random, ready to summon our shared unreadiness;

others, camouflaged as water-coolers, chatrooms and EXITS that spring in the hive mind when blows crack our mirrors.

Standing near it, this may-pole (now the why-pole) we don't quite huddle;

instead, shrugging, offering unknowing looks of urgent timidity.

There's a thickness in the air; we ration breath between us almost consciously, passing emotions back and forth like little notes written in wobbly curves by little children.

Information dribbles in in strings;

strings of information shifting our human weight from foot to foot; another string, hooked just under the ribs meant to drag out a gasp, or cry.

Strings, ripe for tangling set some on stumbling paths of newness, love and pain;

other strings, knotted but soon cut, leave a mark like tightly-wound twine on a finger.

In the end, the word's come down; an accident; some are dead; we did not know them,

it's a terrible loss.

We are safe, and very silent, looking at each other with more than eyes.

Forever now, we share the breaking; we were together when we heard.

A flimsy kind of frame around a reality refracted by distance into abstraction.

We are now in an opened moment; an absence has become a presence in the lives of those

who gathered at the muster point, dry of tears, but in mourning somehow, too in the strange light of a new connection.

Something’s begun; we disperse from the muster point, wondering if there’s truly such a things as our own selves.