Mail Chimp asks me to “Confirm Humanity” 
before submitting poems to a particular journal.
It requests a declaration that I am not a robot but 
refrains from leading me through a maze of photos 
with spans or parts of bridges arrayed 
in chaos that would surely not convey traffic.

Today, when even removing the down jacket
from my tensed shoulders is a heavy lift,
I cannot whole heartedly confirm humanity.
AI controls this exchange and hurls
us all into a robotic universe where, alone,
my question echoes, flapping the missing
pronoun—third person, singular, possessive—
like a disembodied hand waving goodbye
in the Void for all eternity. Must I confirm

all of humanity or just my own? What
about the worst and the best thereof?
And all those in the huge swelling middle
of the eight billion vibrating continuum?
Can I not just confirm that I am alive
and warm enough inside, that a coating
of ice and snow whitens the dun of winter
and a female Downy pecks at the suet feeder?
                        

Cloud vapors freeze in the twenty-seven-degree
chill, a chiffon-fine coating of ice slicks road surfaces.
Almost to town, we abort the trip, turn around
in the driveway of the house that looks like Psycho
in Disneyland while the shrill wail of the cat
repeats across eighteen wasted miles.
Best not to risk the descent to the highway
with a fatal slide off Backbone Mountain when I
have neglected the cat’s condition too long already.

Though I have loved this cat for fourteen years,
last year slid me into neglect’s abyss; grief and death
dug their deeper hole with every scrabbling clutch
of my hands trying to claw back to life. Today
in this bleak bitter weather, I let starvation,
cold, war, murder sit beside me—these
existential ills forever twinned with life.
Who am I to build a fire and fill the bowls,
to provide safe shelter and warm blankets
when I cannot care for myself, cannot lift
off the burdensome mantle of aging and loss?

But the steam from a mug of tea you’ve made,
the poems pinging inside my ribcage— 
persistent as ice pellets assailing the windows—