March 19, 2020
Eyes adjusted to the dark. Shattered my screen on concrete.
Breathing myself to sleep becomes my new beat—
My body will ache, without constant clatter:
Grindr taps. Viral videos. Digital deluge.
I am overwhelmed by the pressure and heat.
They told me to reduce, my use, and recycle
So I learned to start a compost:
Egg shells. Peet’s Coffee. Orange peels.
When I arrive at the end of the world.
I will grow myself a better tomorrow. Food
won’t waste, preserved to the point of future fuel.
Fossils: Gatorade, Lipton, Mountain Dew. A new natural—
landscapes of plastics planned to last longer than my impact
or the home-cellar stocked with enough Kraft
Macaroni and Frosted Mini-Wheats for our final supper.
Take the stairs, turn off the lights, stop the tap.
Climate change is not at prevalent local warming,
so ignore the warnings. But now, a revival of survival
skills: folding t-shirts, frozen dinners, friendly Facetimes.
I learned to fear the air, the sky, as the gravity of humanity
pulled the planet apart until pleasure usurped purpose.
I think my world has ended before.
Like when, I cracked my sister’s window.
A marble maybe. caused a hairline fracture. She
, the always good one, candidly confessed my original sin.
I, the always stubborn, lied through the night, refusing to admit
my mistakes to my mother, until the fissure became a fault in the
foundation of our family, a future of full-out fights with my father.
These are days when I felt like it froze over,
or just spiralled into entropy, knocked out of our
rightful place in space. So I hide under blankets of smoke,
smoke out the sounds of waging wars knocking at my door.
It only helps a little. Nature's symphony so loud
the waging war bleeds into my dreams and days.
I tried to prepare for the end of the world,
2,569 pictures of clouds fill my cloud. The digital diary
I’m compelled to complete, knowing that the sleek un-Apple
apparatus I cling to will be obsolete. I want to remember the feel
of my phone: Google Chrome, Chase Bank. Camera Connect.
It’s functions drive my life, while my details fill it’s drive.
The cold burns, but I continue to hold in an ungloved hand
my personal portal to the sun and all the stars. I used to wait
to watch daybreak, through endless isolated ignorance.
Now I worry I will combust. Burning fires, my body blistered
and withered without instinct of nature or education of nurture.
And then the world ended anyway.
Endgame type shit. Except in reality the Avengers
entertainment only got in the way. I am suffocating in
the convenience of empty store bags reading:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a nice (sick) day.
The window is fixed now, a pristine view of
it snowing all Sunday. The clock I used to play around
paused and I had to stay, inside. I cried dusk away, went to bed
in March’s winter and woke up in the spring of May.
The end of the world.