5. Isn't It

His eyes look empty under the harsh lights.

In a voice like a beggars’ (half breath and half desperation),

he implores the lost sheep of his congregation.

His cadence quivers;

he has imported his rhythm from Whitman,

his conviction from the puritans.

He says,

“Every life

has so much influence

on every other life

that lacking any person

the world could never

be complete—

                and that’s really what it comes down to,

isn’t it?”

Isn’t it.

That empty tag that flags his stab at profundity,

tacked awkwardly onto the end of his thought.

I don’t know, Dimmsdale, I answer in my mind.

Is it?

Let’s take a poll. Let’s do the math.

If train A leaves the station at time x and train B leaves y at z,

how many passengers have to die in the impending collision

before it’s considered a tragedy?

This was mostly for fun. My preacher brother-in-law does use this emotional "isn't it" tag, and it always makes me want to be really condescending, so I let it out in poem form. I probably won't try to wrangle this one into the ten that are good unless I have to. Like, if you actually think about the rhetorical question, the human inside you is like, "well, I mean, one death in a train crash would be tragic for close friends and family..." The nature of an indignant tone is that it only works by appealing to a belief you and the reader find so obvious that it's offensive someone else could mess it up. I'm not convinced that the belief, "a single person is not worth enough for their death to be a tragedy" is that obvious.