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I don't want to know how the world will end,
I've already been there. I know how it happened.
Spare the world on fire like the end of melt-downs
quick frozen under your mattress, icicles poking
from the edges of Depends, theories of makeshift
post-habitable lands curried for a single stalk of viable wheat
by arctic winds scorching the last page of inedible tundra.
I've been there, heard the stories a thousand times beating
down the doors of every last swindling auto-mechanic demanding
a fast way out of town at an affordable price. It ends here and now,
not in ice or war, but as explosion of silence deep in the throat
indifferent to distinctions between light and dark, day or night;
permits no final say but to loom larger every morning as a reminder
of the progress fire is making across fields we will never outlive;
words brief as kindling; the night, a pale fragrance of seeping blood
and soon, all too soon, I will strip the mattress, open the front door
and step out into the wind.
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