In the beginning there was god, nothing,
There was blackness, as an atom waited
To explode - Depending what you believe.
The oceans, seas, rivers were created
With the brush of a pen against the black thought.
The earth formed around the written verses
Of God, of nothing, of black, an atom
Waiting to explode, create universes.
In the beginning there was the poet
With his pen, who wrote the new dust into
Existence, who personified the dust
Into the figure of a man, in the
Beginning the poet took the man’s dust blown
Ribcage and wrote a woman with his bone
There is this pen waiting patiently
between my thumb and my forefinger;
it has been promised an explosion,
the deterioration of the atmosphere.
Currently it is silent and calm
across every inch of this planet,
but this pen is watching the clock,
anticipating the way dirt will shift
from a world collapsing inward.
It is prepared to paint the colors
of desolace that will fall softly
across the ocean when final gun shots sleep.
Stillness will crawl inside the horizon
much like a sun rise,
but there will be no sun
(or moon, or stars)
there will only be
a sky, empty of light.
Cars cough to life on the highway
breathing grey exhaust into the wintery
air of early January.
If you glance at the streetlights
quickly enough - and at the right angle-
one might see the image of teeth
illuminated against the sky’s backdrop,
but it is only a trick of light
playing against a paranoid mind.
No, there are no teeth,
only streetlights and car
breath accenting a cold morning
in January. The year is only beginning,
no time for hallucinations
or fuzzy ideas of destruction.
Now is a time to rest
and enjoy the smell of Christmas
fading from my nostrils,
the warmth of coffee,
the glimmer of streetlights,
of teeth,
of streetlights.
The year the world’s
suppose to end
started with a kiss,
the traditions -
peas with bruised eyelids,
drinking a little fire,
and counting backwards.
No one mentioned destruction
or death, or endings.
They only spoke of beginnings.
We are invincible,
are we not?
5. The Day the World Ended
Death was not littered
across gray skies,
no one sat in a cellar
drinking down fire
waiting, just waiting,
for final seconds to expire.
Nuclear waste could not
be tasted in the wind
and the news stations
weren’t broadcasting
war or rebellions
or anything
at all.
It was actually a quiet day;
a woman sat by the fire
reading a paperback book
(a truck stop romance),
an older couple walked - hand in hand-
through the old neighborhood
where they first fell in love,
and the sky collapsed above
in an absolute silence
that dissolved through the atmosphere.
