Derrick C. Brown - “Instead of Killing Yourself”
please read this.
Three is the number of those who do holy work;
Two is the number of those who do lover’s work;
One is the number of those who do perfect evil
Or perfect good.
"
A soul of water,
A soul of stone,
A soul by name,
A soul unknown.
The hours unmake
Our flesh, our bone.
The soul is all;
And all alone.
“Her lips didn’t taste like church but her hips felt like God.”
They called it an
Alien life form:
Micro-organisms that flooded the Earth
and chemically induced the universe into labour
look up and see:
the gaping maw of the black hole
Gushing stars
light years away even as it looms
Above me gran takes my syringe
and pushes it under her mottled skin
I tell her:
We’re hurtling towards
Death
Terrible and freeing and
Inevitable as the crash
She laughs:
Honey, that is what aging is
Magnified in the sturdy round
glasses which make her bug-eyed
my nan stares into the crashing of Time and
Space
The economy and the stock market
in the face of the end of everything
do not matter.
The government brought out their deadliest weapon:
Kindness
They shipped people freely across the oceans
Stopped taxes
Asked us all to work into our graves
to keep this reaped world spinning
There was nothing else to do so we did
Six months before it I fell in love
Thousands of miles away from home
In the eastern prairies
Surrounded by indolent wasps
Glittering like diamonds in sawdust
I took the blue-printed forms
down to the smear-eyed commissioner
(I spent my last days
fucking him on huge white sheets;
kissing him under
The universe torn apart into
tendons like spun silk
unfurling across the sky)
w o n d e r f u l
aahhh
