Looking Ahead

When the end comes 
will you be able to sit with it

and keep telling yourself
it is all going to be OK? 

Are you willing to find a park bench
upon which to sit by yourself

in the last green grove on earth
and tell yourself this too shall pass?

Think about how you are trying
to make the best of this, of how

everything you’ve known till now
is coming to a point:

all existence squeezed into a dot now,
a pencil mark

on a dirty scrap of paper;
the world compressed to a period

at the end of
a sentence fragment,

and it’s harder that ever to recall
what that sentence was.

It made sense.
That’s all you know. 

It was uttered by someone
you loved, or could have loved. 

All you’ve got to go on
is one faded period and 

an illegible word
to puzzle over. Same as it has been

for most of existence: broken puzzles
are offered with great authority

and finality. No answer, no clues.
All you have to do is figure it out

and speak it for it to be real. Are you willing?
Are you ready to have this be the way it ends?