Everything is fine: a means to endure  
news cycles, historic cycles, menstrual 

cycles. This is walking home after work,  
crawling into bed naked. Night, quiet with 

snow. I am an empty bank account.  
I am a pylon glowing in the dark. I am  
a primal scream. I am not here.         

The body speaks first. If that doesn’t work,  
the mind empties: a crate of crabs scuttling

toward nothingness. Authoritarianism 
blossoms like a corpse flower: foul men 

spread their stench across the globe.  
I remember these songs. It’s all on fire. 

A meteor // a virus // a bomb   
like a dark-eyed angel hurtles toward us. 

I’d like to see the ocean lap against a glacier 
before the end. I’d like to see the northern 

lights. I’d like to watch effigies of foul men  
burn in the desert. I’d like to be there, reel there, 
at the end.

we cannot explain the world, named the same as marrow beaten to glue
            bones circling the belly of the Earth
            our voices shattering the glass windows
of unrelenting, heated houses: mother describes the world: a tumour. yes.

the broad and flat elements of borders. yes. like zodiacs.
            yes. mirage of a late world, slung from tractor factories.
            yes. still hidden from the door, a warbler is undone by singing today. 
yes. Signal Hill, Castries, Bagatelle, until gone, we—sudden and halved.

my mother says, look how we are astonished
            by the jails, I say, by the floors holding our reflections
knowing enough medicine, enough 
            to call the burning world back to love

if I outline myself in nothing now, a time-travelling letter
            is it that I have known the map
the maker of it, the doors, 
            the maker of them, and yet near the last of time, 
your trembling, so endless, it is that I am static stunned, 
            still, by our movements between forms 

            and for the sake of alchemy we talk of butterflies
            passing over New York, meeting no resistance 
going past the galvanized sheds. they are cut-outs of themselves
at 560 miles beyond our Earth, passing through the tall grasses

next to a fortune of mirrors and years, more sounds of fur 
            find me there with yellow mud, enough and more tiffs
            proof of the waterlog of companionship, the demisting riverbed
more terrifying now: the body embattled by itself. things we are astonished by—

for the cloak of despair thrown over our bright & precious
corners but tell that to the lone bird who did not get the memo
dizzy & shouting into the newly unfamiliar absence of morning
light from atop a sagging branch outside my window—a branch

which, too, was closer to the sky before falling into the chorus
line of winter’s relentless percussion all of us, victims to this flimsy math 
of hours I was told there was a cure for this. I was told the darkness
would surrender its weapons & retreat I know of no devils who evict themselves

to the point of permanence. and still, on the days I want
to be alive the sunlight leaves me stunned like a kiss
from someone who has already twirled away by the time my eyes open 
on the days I want to be alive I tell myself I deserve a marching band

or at least a string section to announce my arrival above
ground for another cluster of hours. if not a string section, at least one
drummer & a loud-voiced singer well versed in what might move me
to dance. what might push my hand through a crowded sidewalk

towards a woman who looks like a woman from my dreams
which means nothing if you dream as I do, everyone a hazy quilt
of features only familiar enough to lead me through a cavern of longing
upon my waking & so I declare on the days I want to be alive I might drag

my drummer & my singer to your doorstep & ask you to dance
yes, you, who also survived the groaning machinery of darkness
you who, despite this, do not want to be perceived in an empire
awash with light in the sinning hours & we will dance

until our joyful heaving flows into breathless crying, the two often pouring
out of the chest’s orchestra at the same tempo, siblings in their arrival & listen,
there will be no horns to in the marching band of my survival.

the preacher says there will be horns at the gates of the apocalypse & I believed even myself
the angel of death as a boy, when I held my lips to a metal mouthpiece & blew out a tune
about autumn & I am pressing your ear to my window & asking if you can hear the deep
moans of the anguished bird & how the wind bends them into what sounds like a child
clumsily pushing air into a trumpet for the first time & there’s the joke:

only a fool believes that the sound at the end of the world would be sweet.