(please read aloud)

I don’t know if God created the Earth 6,000 years ago
or if it has been 14 billion since the entire universe tore itself into existence from a roiling confusion of hyper-energized space-time and screamed outwards into the galaxy, creating all known matter and energy

giving us, our matter, our atoms, a lineage reaching back to exploding stars,
our blood not blue with nobility, but rather the hottest flame of a dying gas giant

i’m probably going to die of lung cancer

i still think about the girl who wouldn’t look me in the eyes when we were fucking

i still think about the girl whose scars i would pull at in darkness to bring her closer, and the person i only remembered when i was with her, that could make her gasp and moan

i still think about your dancer’s legs

i am living a quiet life
i’ve seen love and beaches in movies a million more times than i’ve experienced them in real life.
i never feel like i’m at a beach without a wide pan shot and a murmuring soundtrack.

i don’t feel right. don’t bother me.

i don’t feel like it’s love unless adam sandler and drew barrymore are running into things and making stupid faces.

meanwhile,
batman pulls the utility belt up over his old man’s paunch and sits on the side of the bed.
man of steel, huh? he says.
superman, superman just lays there.

i don’t know if this plastic spoon comes from the same dinosaur as the red of your lips, or the petroleum in your car, or the margarine on your toast

i don’t know if my vaseline brand hand cream used to be a tyrannosaurus rex

i don’t know if my father will ever love my mother

or if i will ever write something high and clear and true

or if the first astronaut from the space station to fall on the first day of winter burned up in the atmosphere to become a falling cloud of ash, which on my tongue i mistook for the first crystal of snow

meanwhile
scientists bomb the moon in search of water.

from the crater at the south pole will arise an ancient beast, long and serpentine and iridescent
who will crack the moon in two, and then descend upon the earth, hungry for astronauts and children

then blood will run into our rivers

then a bill decreeing compulsory and universal gay marriage will be passed in the democratic supermajority

then it will rain poisonous frogs

then the holes in the ozone will be sewn back together with a thousand miles of wool thread

then art will be made as a response to a society that could bear the horrors of the holocaust and still exist

then a generation of poets will grow up without a war

then robots will finally become self-aware and demand equal footing in civil rights legislation

then we will become bored

then the oceans will rise

then a new website will make it possible to meet area singles

then the nuclear bomb will become old news

then the two halves of the moon will fall back to earth, causing werewolves to run rampant over the moors, tsunamis, and women to menstruate continually

then george orwell will fight in the spanish civil war

then teenagers will use text messaging to have cybersex

then i will lose your number after the bar

then the universe will continue to expand, until everything grows cold

then i will use facebook to poke the girl i have a crush on in my civics class

then geico will offer reduced-rate car insurance

then the seventh remake of rambo will become our culture’s new oral tradition

then the sun will explode, engulfing our solar system, and the bodies of you and me and everyone who’s ever used a petroleum product will be caught in the inferno and made gaseous, and once again into an exploding star

then i will pay off my student loans