This is failure. Hill
after smoldering hill rolls out,
Flame. The sky burns
brown-orange. Look
Up: that roar pounding
your ears—huge plane,
Stalling above? No,
just flying too low, laboring
Heavy-laden: prisoners,
weighted with fire
Gear. When rains come,
they too bring ruin, dark
Stain rising in homes
not consumed. This was not
Doom. Seems all it
takes for apocalypse is us
Making mistakes we
won’t fix. Under a fallen sky
Of ash we scurry
masked, infected by the beasts
We crowd, crowding each
other side by side
Because we haven’t met
enough people who’ve
Died. Are you sick yet?
I’m not. Odd, life that
Seemed so
see-what-my-new-phone-does
Frivolous winds up,
surprise, so serious,
And science—such a blur
in school, that
Smelly frog—turns out so
disrespectful
To what we’d prefer, making
us not
Conquerors, but freaks,
of nature. What
Creature fouls its
nest, kills its own kind? If
The day breaks that
lets us take off these
Masks, perhaps we’d best
speak up, not like
The cop who’s scared to
tell the bad cop:
Stop. Because the
bailiff’s here, the jury’s in,
No joke, there’s smoke,
there’s fire, this is
Failure. Look down:
that small stream running
Over rocks, the one you
love to stand and
Listen to alone—that
tumbling warbling
Glistening rush is just
the sound of water
Striking stone, blocked
and blunted,
Flung-off, shattered,
split, only to flow
Against, around,
through, over, under—
On. I dip my hand into
the cool, another
Plane flying above. The
charred ash
That should mark my
forehead as
A sign, the stream
instead keeps
Trying to bear off, to
clear, to
Pardon, to forgive,
trying to
Carry far away, trying
to
Bear it, trying,
trying.
