They installed locks
handed you keys.
Hold them, silver, golden,
shaking with dis-ease.
A vision of the Earth outside.
Squinting in a dark hallway,
why not turn the ***,
nudge yourself inside?
Someone paid for you to live here,
a father, mother, or friend.
Your chain of life extends far backwards
but on this side it must end.
You may have felt forever,
trapped with your despair,
between rough crust,
precious residue
floating in air.
Pressure can't hold us
with clouds
and shapes from dreams.
We'll soon be gone, and you will too.
Don't waste your voice with screams.
It, too, is faltering,
our voice,
our atmosphere,
hopes for exploration.
Heaving, chest
uncompensated by oxygen,
raided like sarcophagi
with your timid, spinning brain
having no peddler,
to whom to sell it?
No, your home waits here
on solid ground.
Keep your voice wrapped around you,
not in the heavens, as you'd wish.
Take off both shoes,
sit down.
Patiently inhale.
Feel worlds shifting their weight
skin, becoming pale.
Shake off saw-dust covering
your day-clothes.
Stretched
dissected.
Carpet does this to frame,
taking you through thresholds
and mindsets.
Evaporate,
see no more today.
Rain down until tomorrow
in this never-ending night
given to trees
collecting your purple-pink
and blue
dews.
Leaves bending
with gratitude
holding drops of you
aloft
before
no heat can take you up
and they,
becoming coffins
for you,
weep
and cover your dis-may.
A dashed possibility.
Like a dust moat in the sky,
preventing
a window past your mind,
what you saw standing atop
brittle decrepitude
through saccharine eyes
is shifting, impermanent,
time cannot be mistaken.
Relax.
A tear pulls
the horizon,
lightning
rips your sight.
Breathe as long as it takes
to stop breathing.
Alone, shaking.
Silver, golden.
in this eternal night.
No one re-writes directions to that fixture
out in space, yet near.
But you know it once was twirling
because you followed its light
to here.
Turn the keys they gave you
and look, inside the frame
of consciousness.
There is one artwork you create
with every facile, blinking motion
every extended being,
your thick paints of colors,
never able to be seen.
There once was chaos in man
he wanted so much to scream.
Instead he reconciled to whisper
and laugh.
Open-mouthed, blind and plodding--
there's no one to teach him how to dance--
he falls through space
alone on his rock.
MMXII
MMXII
Inspired by
Sigur Rós - Njósnavélin (The Nothing Song)
and
Friedrich Nietzsche's Last Man from Thus spake Zarathustra
This poem tries to imagine the last person standing on Earth and seeing that the Sun has burned out,
realizing they are trapped with all destruction of our species and also knowing that they have to imagine what those who came before them had physically seen.
I want to write more about our ancestors...
