How to survive an apocalypse
a poem - October 2020
Last Thursday I stroked a horse and muzzled it before it leant askew. There were ghosts in its hair that played in even the lightest of breezes. A tap tap tap and away it moved; the sun was a cold ghost behind it. You can find me by the water skimming stones with a rich need to impress anyone who’ll watch. They don’t come back, no matter how hard I try to picture them in my mind. The river bed has them now though I’m not sure it is thankful. I hope sometimes the ground will shift with a soft pop pop pop and then that’d be it. Every time my mum calls me I assume I need to iron another shirt. I spend too much time just trying to remember the faces of people. I can’t recall the last time I remembered a number and just dialled it and that has formed itself into an acute, specific pain: binary, engrams spill into the air with the toxic mendacity of a carbon monoxide leak. I caught a cold in your arms while you slept and slept and slept. I remember only your critiques, and how I should water tomatoes in a very particular way. In the end there’s nothing really to lose. All our leaves yellow eventually. Perhaps we tie our shoes the same way, and that’ll be the way that we echo-locate over the top of the violent cloud systems that wrap and churn. The muscle memory renders me inadequate, as I tie a bow and scan the ever-growing crowd of lost faces.