today

Well
there seem to be a few people around
and I guess that it is something like middle school still with friends and parents
but I'm wondering where people made their split from ridiculous aspirations
and just settled for smoking pot in the hazy shades of ruined buildings.

Are you still waiting for the cataclysmic Apocalypse?
Well, that still has to be addressed
but what I figure
is that it is there
when I stare at strangers' faces
and notice the dead eyes
sifting lazily around matters of chance and fear
that and I find their madness perfectly common.

We once drove through amber sunlight
in the emeralds of deciduous forest dew
and like the radio played insanity?
Let me ask you a few questions.
How did we meet?
Was it over dinner on a scarred picnic bench
that was missing its white paint
where the druggies had marked with vandalism
their separate lingos
with pocket knives and lighter burns
wondering all the while
how beautiful an elm could be?
Or was it in transit
on a grim bus system in the pouring, howling downpour of ash
as the punk rock lesbians
committed their different suicides without medical assistance,
drowning in a world of fair sex and shopping districts,
as though we were the few
who noticed the awful weather all along,
gazing in seconds at pink and blue skyscrapers
that seemed to hold yesterday's hues of sunsets
while the shaved men went to work
and chewed on fucking bananas for lunch.
Where ever it was, dear one
you could tell
that everybody else felt smug in their sunglasses
but I really wanted you to buy me jewelry
and maybe you did somehow
but I know that first
you gave black pearls to the wrong person
and why you felt the existential nothingness in that fact
is beyond me
when most people will just throw cash as gifts
and tuck it in their back pocket
while the awful world
and all its concrete sidewalks
heaves and moans
in the difficult orbits
of a less stationary sun
that keeps it glow and fire up there
like a legacy for the last lovers on Earth
to point towards
when the Hatred of Strangers
calls in ink black darkness as cold as a meat locker,
but please tell us one day
what it was that you found beautiful here
send it in the mail
send it on the phone
don't write it out in letters
and don't voice it out in words.