I tried to call you one night but you were in Thailand.
I was listening to Tool’s “Opiate” and reading about the particulate
levels in China and the meteor that had narrowly missed us yesterday
and realized I’d missed the recent eclipse and also missed you.

I realized 40 years of learning were leaking through the lesions in my brain,
names and faces and memories of us and I wanted to reassure you
that I would still remember you but then maybe I won’t – like the radioactive
water leaking from Fukushima burning the algae and sea lions –

nature takes what it wants from us. And what have we learned
that will do us any good, standing here on the brink of fire and flame,
of disaster, of zombie movie dystopia and plague and final girls:
what will we hold onto? At the end all we have is ourselves

and sometimes not even that. We must be our own saviors.
We must wield the axe against the assassin that is death and time,
that is endings and goodbyes, chop down the difficulties
and the disappointments until the wall is gone, until we are back

in the sunlit yards of our childhoods, when we could still cry
without irony and sweet things still tasted sweet and my limbs
didn’t end in numbness, remember that? If we can still remember,
then somewhere things must be better than here.