We came into it, or some of us did at any rate, with eyes open, not wide, not bright, but okay, blurry and bleary, with booze and winter’s dew, half open, hallucinating that something was gone and needed farewell and something was beginning that needed a welcome and an embrace, but in truth nothing was going and nothing was coming that was new because it is only a continuum, a flip that happens each day on the calendar, or on the clocks or, nowadays, on mobiles, just a flip, as quotidian as quotidian, but you know we make ceremonies of things because we need to kid ourselves, and we need to wipe slates we have dirtied so we can dirty them anew, with, what is that worthless thing called, whatchamacallit, resolutions, yeah right, resolutions about this shall cease to happen and that shall begin, this should be dropped and that should be picked up, that sort of utterly useless and repetitive thing, but that is what we do, don’t we, that is our core expertise, doing things and doing them repetitively, often without putting our minds to what we are putting our other body parts to, that is how we have come here, in such numbers, the most populous mammalian tribe on the planet possessed of a language, or many, we do such things, mindfully or mindlessly, and we are yet to be told whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, you know, this comfort in numbers, or very often, this discomfort in numbers, which is why very often we resolve that these numbers need to be reduced and we resort to HR consultancies or armament firms so we produce the reasons and the instruments to reduce our numbers, you know, pink slips or atom bombs, those sorts of things, we never tire of who we are or what we do, and when we intermittently feel a sense of weariness, we do drastic things, like resizing, or declarations of war, or war without even the need to declare a war — that happens — that may not be legit or allowed but we routinely permit ourselves things that are not legit or what’s not allowed, which is why we found the need for laws and norms, and courts and conventions, so we may be restricted our infringements and be punished for when we care no more and go out and commit them, that sort of thing, you know what I mean, don’t you, I very much hope you do, and are aware that we do things and we then proceed to undo them and then some of what we do and some of what we undo we call progress, like what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki we considered the consequence of spectacular human progress, and even though we hold lachrymose memorials and murmur our never agains, there is never enough evidence that we will never again resort to effecting the consequences of our progress on ourselves, I mean look around the planet and count the number of spots where we haven’t participated in the eruption of this sort and where we are not embattled putting down, or trying to, the consequences of what we call progress but experimenting with more progress, such as the the fast-tracking of an antidote to a contagion that came from our abuses and our arrogance and which came to so petrify us that we had to stop being what we were and stop whatever we were doing wherever we were and we had to go scurrying for remedies and repair, also known as R&R, but this one being a different sort of R&R, meaning not rest and recreation but rigour and research, but anyhow, that is what we needed to do and that is what some of us spent time doing in order that many multiple others could overcome, but the truth is the overcoming is still not clearly in sight and we are, towards the end, as blurry and bleary-eyed on what is to come as we were at the calendar beginnings of all of this...

...so we end as we often do
Upon a clumsy rhyme
Could’ve said bye but I say boo
Wasn’t it such a bloomin’ time.