The End of the World

"When the world ends, white dust will fill the air like the curtain at the end of a play.

A rain of desperate bodies will fall from the windows of burning buildings, drumming the concrete below."

The end will arrive as a thief in the night,

step by step it will tear your world apart.

Factories will disappear overseas

corporations vanish into thin air.

Cities dying from the inside out will spread like ringworm,

the shrapnel spray of suburbs slicing through forest and field.

"Wars will reach from continent to continent and neighborhood to neighborhood.

Tides will rise with global warming.

Acid rains will fall with the last of the redwoods.

Computer systems will crash with stocks and stock markets.

Species will vanish with increasing speed.

The timebombs ticking will be your synchronized heartbeat.

You will feast upon the dead.

Your body will become a graveyard for rotting corpses.

Your lungs will be filled with toxicity until one day everyone has cancer."

Maybe nothing will happen at all,

business will continue as usual:

Prison guards pace concrete tombs.

Psychiatrists contemplate madness.

It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?

"When the world ended, people came out of their apartments

and met their neighbors for the first time;

They shared food, stories, companionship.

No one had to go to work or the laundromat;

Nobody remembered to check the mirror or scale or email account

before leaving the house. Graffiti artists surged into the streets;

Strangers embraced, sobbing and laughing.

Every moment possessed an immediacy formerly spread out across months.

Burdens fell away, people confessed secrets and granted forgiveness.

The stars came out over New York City;

And nine months later, a new generation was born."