(23) This Is Not A Simulation

This is Not a Simulation
For WorldVision's 30 Hour Famine

The sirens in your stomach
are sounding the alarm;
they are shaking you awake
to the state of emergency
in which your human family exists.

It is only 15 hours since eating;
only 16 hours since sleeping
     in the safety of your bed,
and it is already obvious how absurd--
no, obscene-- it is
to think that human beings
actually live like this.
People might as well be asked
to pack their things
and move into the ocean.

Because your little taste of emptiness
already feels like desperate starvation,
and the cold is cutting like knives
through your pathetic little blankets,
and the openness in which
      you are trying to sleep
has never seemed so fearfully alive.

And it makes no sense
that your only consolation--
that come tomorrow afternoon,
it will all be over,
and you can resume the business of living--
is flatly untrue
for almost a billion fellow humans.

You don't even want to think about this
as a perpetual state of existence,
can't even imagine not having that hope
to whisper to your stomach
to hush the alarm it is blaring:
this is a state of emergency;
this is not a simulation.