Terence Degnan
living through the world’s slowest apocalypse
the sidewalk
is a small and uncared for
tiny dystopia, itself
with a stray cat
a plastic former thing
a crack running from the house
to the street
and somebody’s name
connected to somebody else’s
between hearts and arrows
the Earth has an arrow
running all the way through it
like an equator
that is how humans love
and I’m waiting through the movies
just to see her
knock us off her plate
for a good last time
the Earth has a human problem
as a species
we’ve always started out relationships
with their ends in sights
there are days I forget
to count the bombs
on the peninsula
or carbon feet
or how many battleships
are left on the pegboard
populations
or silos per capita
there are whole weeks that transpire
that I forget to number the bees
or pull their bodies
out of the trenches in the windowsill
that’s how slow
the end times can get
I live in a city
whose pixels have been annihilated
so many times
that it’s hard to believe the bridges
are there
even when I’m walking on one
from one borough to another
you can see her trademark scrapers
from states
to the north and west
and if you use your imagination
and a tricky index finger
you can trace King Kong
and a few biplanes
roaring around her tallest buildings
my whole life has been peppered
by drowning statues
but the truth is that
they are gonna rust to death
or outlive their confederacies
I’ve seen flags sterilized by modern times
but I’m still waiting for the day
that we stop saluting
altogether
I’m still waiting for the last soldier
to put on permanent
civilian clothes
there’s this old expression
about the digestive aspects of money
but nobody ever traces that line
all the way to subsidies
nobody ever asks
how you’d like your buffer cooked
I live in a neighborhood
of microwaves
and I don’t own a microwave
but you’d think there’s enough
traffic in the air
that my heart’s been cooked
for the better half of a century
I exist in probablies
I know the world is going to end
but I don’t want to pick the last chapter
of this adventure
I’d vote for flowers
I’m putting my inedible fortune
on daisies
I pass a small apocalypse every morning
and the proof of our endings
gets trapped in the cracks
every time a human crosses over
like a house with replaceable tenants
you can tell a story about humanity
by what gets caught
in the gaps of the floorboards
they’ll tell my kid’s story
in Superballs and cereal
I’d like to think that she has generations
to spare
but she’s probably
got an iceberg’s chance
of passing her name down
by no more than two
additional names
on a sidewalk
that nobody takes the time to mend
Terence Degnan is the author of Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016) and The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave (Sock Monkey Press, 2012). His work has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Other Herald, and The OWS Poetry Anthology, as well as in the anthology, My Apocalypse (Sock Monkey Press, 2012). His two spoken word albums, BC (2008) and Calling Shotgun (2010) can be found on iTunes and Spotify.
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