and noticing that much
is enough to remind me that
all of this only amounts
to meteoric chances and happenstances,
so even the worst of it will come to its end—
and maybe that just has to do
with the optimistic sap in me.
But even then, you greet me
“Good morning,” and I hear you,
and you sound like you're of the Sun
touching through the barricades of Woodbury,
where the undead ******* can't touch us.
And you buffer the cold of the wind
and the wet of the rain
when the kindling is too soaked
to start a fire big enough
to counter the draft
coming from under the doors,
or dry our jackets by the fireplace.
Which probably sounds like naivety,
but even after Woodbury rots from the inside out,
and we lose the car and our last can of beets
somewhere during our escape, and the rest of the way,
we're joking about the way things were
before they got worse, while hypothesizing
about the fall of man, epidemics and expiration dates
to forget the endless hills aching our feet, I could tell you:
“Sure, I mean, there are ten-thousand ways
the world can go to **** (and it probably has,)
and I might not live to one-hundred-three,
but if the world's gonna burn on me now,
it's always better watching with you.”
This poem, like a few that came after it, was heavily influenced by the nature of a post-apocalyptic world (thanks, The Walking Dead,) and dreams that I had relating to it. I seldom have nightmares about zombie apocalypses; usually they end up capturing this moment of tranquility in the midst of a decaying wasteland that is an effigy of what the world once was.
It's an element to that world that intrigues me; the idea of anything that could possibly go wrong, being likely to go wrong, but you have these moments where the shitshow slows down just long enough for you to remember that there's always something, or someone, that's worth laughing at all the bad luck, licking your wounds and doing what you can to scrape by.
