This phrase haunts me — it’s how I describe the pain of being conscious in this twenty-first century. Impossible to live this way, see this way each moment. But I think I’ve finally finished the poem that goes with that title:
apocalyptic breathing
one world
clogs my airway
each time I inhale
the yellow stomach of an albatross chick
plastic heap of bottle caps
part of a syringe, a toy soldier
the skin of a five-year-old son
tattoed with barbed wire
the noise of new missiles
the sweat between martyred limb
and patriotic prosthesis
dead oceans
famine
local homicides
in one world
one throat
I breathe death
a pebbled piece of sin
too far from any gods
or new language
imagining us beyond war
and waste
words rattle
my airway thins
soon this tongue
detonates into inferno
my voice burns to ash
an orphaned pile near my left tonsil
one willowed breath scatters
cinder to its rightful vacuum
If I could end
with hope
I would
wrap myself
in a hope cape
hook my feet to the stars
and dream wrongside up
claim
my ounce of batty vision
one brook-clear
heart-strung
conversation with a neighbor
unplanned unasked for
dispels cataclysm
arrests hiccups
jumpstarts this breath
then the next
