Behold: a country of nested
borders.

Look at it and be awed by
the Big, the Bright, the Beautiful of it.

If you manage to twist it open and enter
you’ll find another within —

less Big, less Bright. (Beauty is in
the eye of the contained.) If you

go in, you will find another,
and then another; it will be dim in there.

At the heart, a battered core with two faces:
one, Black Kettle, the other, Nat Turner;

it is nowhere as Bright and Beautiful
as the Big Doll you can barely recall

now that you’re
all the way in and can see

that even though it is full,
it is also hollow.

They will look back upon us and see us for idiots
looking for stars to do work we needed to do.

They will say the great conjunction
was not Jupiter and Saturn’s illusory closeness

but our own embrace of magical thought
in the face of the growing heat and disease

that took us down. They will say this
while shaking their heads at how

we ignored the mocking laughter
of the implacable science that runs the universe

as it rolled right over us. Our hatreds
spread like a plague even as a true plague

spread just as fast, as we choked the oceans and air
until we were choking as well. The Great Conjunction,

they will say, was not the doubled up light in the sky
but people down here, a black hole,

angry, scared, crowded
into one another so tightly

nothing could penetrate.
No light, no heat, nothing in there

but faith in the efficacy of crossed fingers,
crosses, and whatever the stars might say —

although the stars said nothing except
this one, dear people, is all on you.

This society’s been
huffing gasoline for so long
it can’t sense anything else

All those cells vaporized

It has killed its way
to this point and now
it has only itself left to kill

in the hope it will feel something then

Thrived on erasure
All those bodies left behind
that it can’t even see

The dead keep screaming for it to turn back

Maybe it hopes
that those corpses will compress and fuel
a future like their past

It imagines that it lives on dinosaur leavings

Of course it is wrong about that as well
but without full brains
the people it has sheltered will never understand

how all they have left is fire

We are the movie
(you know the movie)

which just doesn’t look the same now
(does it)

If we had seen it from the beginning
without the mystique

or the audience theatrics to guide us
to an opinion on it

the cringe coming up in the mouth now
at the offenses

might have surfaced earlier
and while some of us had fun for a long time

there were others who said
it wasn’t working for them

and we looked at them funny
at the very least

At least the music was good
and some of those on screen were hot

and we now know how
when certain people show up or speak

we are supposed to yell
ASSHOLE

but overall it’s mostly horror
at what we’ve been fed