Scribbles From the End: Apocalypse Love

The government is coming back today.

 

Their great black bulldogs are coming,

Trundling into our grey city

And turning its ashy bones to splinters under their feet.

 

We were able to keep them out while they were starving.

    Yes, even they starved in the days that belonged to Calamity,

But now they starve no more and they are coming back.

And they remember the Molotovs and the hunting rifles.

 

The shrouded airlift dropped in yesterday

And plucked the secret noses from our hospitality.

Caught them right up and hoisted them to ill-gotten safety.

We knew that the noses were probably here,

We just weren't sure who they were

And we found out too late:

    When they were taken away,

    We knew with a twisting in our guts

    That the bulldogs would not be far behind.

 

We the People assembled at the intersection of Third and Blue Hill

Behind barricades made out of sandbags

And our grandparents’ furniture.

    Who would have thought that the old relics

    Would serve as forts at our age?

 

Behind the barricade, I stand pressed against Phoebe.

    I would call her My Phoebe,

    But how could I?

    What right have I to claim her

    When that is all she has left to herself?

We look to each other,

Linking arms and eyes

And remembering ourselves.

 

Remembering the ancient dock…

    Where we sat and watched America’s final May 15^th

        Wake up and haul itself over the horizon…

    Where we sat as her namesake sang an ode

        To the peachy rays that mapped her gentle, loving contours…

    Where we sat while the lake breeze played with her hair.

 

 

A heat-flash and a glass-crash later,

And the dock is gone,

Along with the sun and the namesake.

 

She is a different map now:

    Hunger has carved gullies in her face

    Eaten a valley into her belly

    And strip-mined her flesh taut over her ribs.

 

She is so tired.

    Sleep runs from her searching grasp

        Like a child playing a game of Tag.

    The strangled night sky seeps into her red-rimmed eyes

        And I can do nothing

        But squeeze a little bit of cold out of her body.

 

She stares up to the void

Like we once did in the field on sticky summer nights,

    Finding diamond masterpieces floating in the ink

    While fireflies watched over us

    And faeries danced in wooded hollows,

But now the deep blue pools have been asphyxiated and cauterised

And timidly clasped hands have been replaced

By quivering, clinging bodies.

 

The bulldogs lumber closer

As I trace her with a ragged, December-nibbled hand:

    Through dirtied obsidian-silk strands,

    Over cheekbone bluffs,

    Coming to rest on ocean crest lips

Before falling away.

 

We draw nearer,

Pressing the setting blood sun between us

As our lips brush together filled with love and languor.

It is a farewell that wrings out our chests

Like the sturdy hands of our mothers wrung out dishtowels.

 

The truncheon speeds toward our skulls

While we ask how our fishing poles and plastic canteens

Turned into empty guns and broken bottles.