This Apocalypse Summer has really got me down, but then I'm up running through what is left of town. I never got to swim the backstroke before Brunswick Basin bled Lake Olympia from amidst her oak, before Deer Creek went dead.
The streets'll burn, the bodies break and the blood washed away by beer. The streets burned, bodies broke and we're still here.
Shadow people wander the sidewalk, been here since the bombs dropped. Never got no noisy television, just watch the streets and shadows in them. I'm pushing up just like daisies and pulling them up for fun. Convinced that I'm going crazy from the trips that I get on.
Jane says she cannot get it: "something hidden...back when children." You're always looking for the road where we used to drink too drunk, where you look to have again what we had so long ago.
Do you feel it coming? on Earth His will be done. Collapse a long time comingβ still nothing new under the sun. Summer is for the living. That's a bubble-bursted, sun-dried reason. It's the end or I am fibbing, still live up the rest of the season.
First came the flood then spilled blood. Had anyone caught on of that to come you know we'd never have let it begun. But it had: got you, your mother, and dad. Surely there was nothing we could do but hunker down, get a job, and rue the day they brought us into the Old World and buried the New.
I hear tell that downriver the water gets warmer; I hear tell that valley below us's a hotter n' hell, body-ridden bowl of dust. β I hear tell that upriver the trout they run thicker, the water cooler, air smoother, and **** sticks thinner. I wanna flee up that river but I'm not that good a swimmer.
How do we know? We think we're smart, in fact we're geniuses. But we're still sitting and can't stop talking about...
This Apocalypse Summer has really got me down, but then I'm up running through what is left of town.
Hysterical. The italics denote a yet more hysterical melodrama where the Apocalypse's beginning becomes ambiguous (Did it come? Is it? Will it?).