The sky is on fire,
it's early July
it's late at night.
My 14 hour shift
ended but I'm
an hour outside Baltimore.
I'm missing out on you.
I know it.
I'm shackled to the
systems of a fading empire
and you'll be grown
and I'll join my dead.
My dead never met you.

I get to thinking about the end.
How it'll be everything.
The little annoying ****
but also the good stuff.
It'll be left mournerless
when it all joins me
and my dead.

The people who loved me.
The people on the losing
side of my struggle
of my timeline.
They never knew me as a father,
some didn't know me as a man.

You belong to the generation
with the bleakest future so far.
I wanted to give you the world,
my littlest man,
unfortunately I am.
I don't have the words.

I'm thinking about the end.
Not the ending.
They're semantically different, sure.
Still...
They are not the same.
I am missing people.
All the time.
My living and my dead.

It's early July,
I'm tired. I feel old.
I feel like a bag of rocks
that used to be a wall.
When I was young,
so many dead ago,
I waited all year long
for the summer.
It was our time,
Goonies one and all.
Summer is different now.

I'm thinking about the end.
TV is over. I feel orphaned.
I used to watch Power Rangers
on a black and white set.
With tuning knobs.
At some point TV became movies
and movies became TV
and they both started to die.

I'm driving down 895
and I see the colorful explosions.
I can hear the pop pop
over the road noise.
The smoke falls and
the streets of Baltimore
are filled with descended haze.
I follow the fireworks home.