As if nothing were new anymore,
Except for the world ending—
You remarked, your hands outstretched
to usher a popping, crackling host,
Alive, to your tongue.
As if the world were ending,
Accept departure
and give me your body.
It is the whisper I heard on
A vast and ebbing wind.
A heron splits the night
with razor feathers that
Lap and tear into
Damp atmosphere.
It slashes onward
without a face,
and there are
Indeterminate
Flourishes of
Abstraction across
Its path.
Artifices collide as
Cold and warm fronts
Eddying and whipping
in frigid vortexes,
Famished for humanity,
Vacuuming up our words
Suspended in pregnant air,
X’s and dipthongs vibrating,
Ampersands saltando,
Commas and hyphens, col legno;
and a waterfall of information
Plucked like a silver string.
It dances in place, sinew
Wound tight to stone pegs
and a liquid neck.
It does not paint secrecy with
Words; it fastens quick
While fascinating. It
Lows a faint cry,
Begging for defibrillation:
Victor Frankenstein’s
Monster, displaced from
Alpine majesty, but
Remaining ensconced in
Those same books and
Grandiose arguments.
All the dreams I had for other women
Are coming true for me, today:
Seated neatly against a white background,
Like a word printed for the first time
I experience Nothingness
and its peace, like the stale public air
in the back of a Crown Victoria,
or behind a locked aluminum door.
From snitched pulpit watching
Us all spin to self-wished
Future emblazoned
with complacent tongues of fire,
I wonder with anxious burden
What I have, in ignorance,
Pilfered in the high-viz night,
and the things which I
Cannot give back,
as It All is now a burnt emblem
of necessary shame.
It is an ongoing travesty—