OK.
This last poem I'm going to read before I share this essay with
you is called "Maybe."
I finally came down to that's the answer.
Are we going to survive?
Maybe.
Are we going to get through this time period?
Maybe.
There's a mention of a coleus, which is a very beautiful house
plant and it comes in many different forms.
But the one I'm thinking about has these wild like ace
of spades shaped leaves that have this red in the middle
and then green around.
It's very beautiful.
So the coleus is my friend in this poem.
Maybe was about all that I could muster,
on the question of whether this world, which
I prefer to think of in the past tense, will flourish.
Though the first of the last fires hasn't even started yet.
Has it?
Maybe the past tense because it implies survival,
back then plus but now, as if the future had already happened
and you, you had made it out alive into midday living
room peace, into 2 o'clock April light, you and a trailing coleus
survivor too.
Each leaf like a dab of dried blood
on a scalloped pad of green.
Sirens in the distance fading.
Sirens in the distance above a wreck of ships
perched where literature starts with war and lost men,
heroes enticed to death by birds with the heads of girls myth
opening its blood drenched wings.
Maybe it wasn't future death hounding me, but past ends.
Not popular apocalypse but cracked Atlantis,
golem Ozymandias.
All the millions, millions really dead in ruined
capitals gone to ash and dream.
Maybe it was my mother's mother's scapegoat trauma blood
keening.
And suddenly I could see them.
Every empire that ever rose and fell
spread out on discs across an infinite plane called Absolute
Now, like records spinning, all playing the same song
track by track, ruin by better tech, ruin by hubris,
ruin by appetite Amok.
And from this vantage history looks like a choice.
And I have to ask now in the present tense,
why choose the past as the future?
Why?
Don't do it.
Don't use the past as the future.
Don't.