Apocalypse Poem 1

Your sister thinks
the world is ending again
She will tell him on the phone
And her voice will crack
And we will both wonder
If it is age or the sighed acceptance
that comes with age,
or if, please god,
the lines are just too long
Stretched just too thin across the waters
And the air is just too thick
for our mother’s voice to carry,
because she doesn’t have the heart
to tell us that
the world is ending again,
that there are no more arks,
No more angels.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,
But our ship was never meant
to leave the harbor.
It just wasn’t built
To set sail and save us.
The world is ending again, and
This poem is not
a solitary rumination.
It is a terrible swan song,
Screeching through the last
Burning sunset
like a dying Pterodactyl.
This poem is
A miserable fish tearing its lips
Apart on the hook
Flapping for survival.
I write you now: get ready.
Because Kafka was wrong,
inspiration will not writhe
at your feet. Like life,
You have to hunt it.
You have to throw out line after line
And pray, Dear god,
Pray there are still
fish for us to kill
until we die.


--
(k)

smoke lead me to fire

When the hairdresser’s hand brushed my face I thought yes this is how we connect. But the long nights, impassive, marked with a cigarette, two people, silent, a large bed, like a dormitory, with invisible boundaries, invisible but perceptible. One must wonder if this was what we were made for. Made by Our Father, made to be aggressive in the mornings, desperate in the noon, numb in the evening. Did he have that in mind, in the design? I thought, I need to go home to get away, to connect with an empty screen, to see, for 35 minutes, images, barely attaching themselves to any sort of imagination, stuck on the walls (if I could be so bold, its laughable) but nothing, a quick accent, a quicker decent. God forbid

God forbid some sort of exchange, some sort of catalyst. Smoke lead me to fire. And if I could start a fire, I would start a fire. But there will always be tears, the mourning parishioners, rather one, dragged through the dirt, like a wild west form of discipline. No horses, no saloons. Tears on one end, and on the other, God knows, that riddle. What has two ends and extends in separate directions, forever? I know the answer. I know, also, that the world is in fact flat, and I can run to the end of it. It wouldn’t be so hard, but I would never.

So this is it then. The stills, cycles, windows with thick glass, they’re all left open, but none of us would dare to climb in, climb out. There it is, its morning, and tomorrow, it will be morning again. Until? I’m betting with a man that something might happen, I’m sitting at a table with that man, staring him in the eyes, reading the future in the shadow patterns, coffee grounds, tea stains, migratory bird patterns, clock ticks, heart-beats, coin tosses, passing of faraway trains.

[A]