Sweet Futility — Because It Isn’t There

Joseph Robertshaw

Captured sidelong by the cusp of night I could see right away that the effort was futile. I wept for a while with the rising sun for, in the deepening blackness of this coming day, who would know? There was a certain freedom in the impending doom, a calm resolution that births confidence that can only come when we are sure, beyond any doubt, that this fate is ours, inescapable. It comes with the dawn, inexorable, like the march of the planets through the space time of the here and now, ever progressing, and yet, never moving in the mind’s eye, at that instant of epiphany caught in memory’s framed haze. Sweet futility provides me with her company as I turn my collar to the first of a million raindrops and slink back to the fire, and my book, as the steel grey sky silently swallows the sun.

My name is Joseph Robertshaw. I like poetry and prose and try to write both. I was asked to leave my high school English class and my high school but all these years later, I have just written a fantasy book. I have dropped out of high school and have earned two master’s degrees. I have taught cooking, safety, customer service and now, for the past five years, First Year Composition. I am a husband and a father and, in my life, I have killed turkeys, cooked chickens, thrown crabs, siphoned salmon. I have been a stay at home navy spouse. I have sailed the Bering Sea and rolled through Europe on the rails. I currently live in Ohio and I expect to earn a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing in 2018.