Lamenting before restless sleep

I am tired of war. The war. Any war. The senselessness of war. That we cannot do anything about it. Or do not. That cannot and do not feel the same in the case of war. We hear about so much money devoted to the insanity of war when the cold sanity of starving is taking people from us before we can fight them. There is death all around, but to say their names would take us years, into the next war or into the next several wars, and their names would become endless. One long groaning name in every language. That you cannot say anything about war without becoming somehow criminal, somehow implicated. So many of us are killed by war without even going into the ranks, without our cities being demolished, without a scratch on us. We are killed by living drenched in senselessness. And not an exploratory senselessness, the kind you hope remains in life, but an oppressive senselessness that crushes our decency with ease, like a boot on a beetle. We lose, we lose, we all lose in war, and first we lose the gentlest things, the roughest things last. We are all made into rough-hewn versions of ourselves, even as we wave the colors of the war-ravaged with tears in our eyes, even when we decry war and all things warlike with agony tearing through us. We lose the ability to talk with any sense about anything at all while a war is going on. The television sets and the internet streams move on to more strategic outlines of the war when the emotional footage of refugees and war crimes no longer gets the views. We argue with our friends and neighbors about the ins and outs of it all, before we have our breakfast or after we have finished a day’s work. The sun shines on the hell of it all the way it would on a festival, and storms drench it or crash into it the way they would for any festival. You would hope the sun would grow tired of being so wrong and so often about the purpose of its rising. But the sun is indefatigable. Tireless like war. At least it seems that way to me, who is tired not only of the war but especially of the war, of war and all wars, and whose tiredness is as extreme as the sun’s newfound and deranged heat.