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? 

When you look outside
expecting trumpets and fire
and all you hear is the drone
of photo opps legions seeking 
clicks and likes and affirmations
from the devils or angels they prefer

Peeking past the blinds
into a gray morning with no
distinguishing features beyond 
unseasonable weather and more 
humans signing on the street these days
jerking drug dances for survival

When you turn with a headshake back around
to the relative warmth of shabby rooms and rugs
and your yet to fail walls and aged thin pipes
it all doesn’t seem as bad as the trumpets
and fires you expected at this point
since you are warm and for the moment aecure

You raise a shout and toss a dance move
A wipe of the forehead and a raised glass
A song to whatever lord you think has saved you
from the trumpets and the fire and the nights in the cold
Forgetting the imminent snuffing of all candles and lanterns
You exhale in uneasy and unwarranted relief

Having a big bowl of mythology
as the first act of the day
is better than taking a shower,
better than anything one can do
except for having sex and 
because the bowl of mythology
contains enough sex
to choke Dionysius or lay
Thor low, it is not as if
you can’t get that too, slurping
legends down in the kitchen
where all you have to go by
is window light. Forget the news,
forget checking e-mails until after
you are full. The old gods know
what’s good for you and they say,
fill yourself with the good news
of how we ran amok once
in our time
and still kept the world spinning.
It will give you hope and then,
your belly full, you can take on chaos
secure in the knowledge that 
given enough stories, enough examples
of randy and bloody and now and then
noble tragedy, you can get up
and be a god yourself — randomly
screwing, assuming perfect disguises,
pressing nuclear buttons
if that’s your thing; the taste of Valhalla
on your lips, the image of the Cross
throwing its redemption shadow over all.
You’ve got big shoes to fill,
a landscape to change, lightning in your belt
waiting to be hurled. It’s the breakfast of
champions: a bowl of mythology
in one of so many flavors you’ll want 
to try them all. Now
in Mixed Indigenous Berry
and East Asian Crunch!
Available for a limited time.

Think about
all the bodies you’ve seen,
human
and otherwise.

Think beyond the human bodies
in funeral homes
or hospitals, perhaps
on battlefields or in 

car wrecks or other accidental carnage;
maybe in family homes if you grew up
in the right part of the world for folks
to die in their homes at peace or in war.

If that’s hard to grasp consider  
that you must have seen
hundreds of flies and wasps on windowsills;
chickens laid out in stores;

roadkill of all species;
the neighbor’s cat
upon a sparrow
under your feeder;

your own cat
upon a mouse
under your
kitchen table.

Have you fished?
Have you hunted?
Those are lovely shoes you are wearing —
isn’t that fine Italian leather? 

Isn’t this lovely, understanding at last
how death has surrounded you and kept you?
All life is sacred, some say.
Few of us say all death is too. It’s a shame;

we love to demonize it, saying we give
our killers the ultimate punishment
when we sentence them to the inevitable,
then sit down to a steak after the deed is done.

It’s a blessing,
this fatigue
that has come so easily 
after a day of twisting
in hard country wind.
Soon enough I hope
I’ll drop into sleep
and settle myself below
the hammering gusts
of day to day
and minute to minute,
hoping that when I rise
I’ll be rested and ready
for tomorrow’s buffeting. 

That must be my body
in that mirror, that nest
of misdirections;

here, what looks like 
a too-short
bindle of twigs;

there, something more like 
a poorly daubed
mud cluster.

Hard to apprehend the whole
when such fragments 
compel so strongly.

There in the mirror
what I think is a reflection of me
stares back piecemeal.

Then again? This is not my mirror.
My own’s covered up
behind my bedroom door. 

I don’t look at it much.
I only see mirrors in
the homes of others. 

If a mirror’s accuracy
is changed
by its provenance,

how am I changed
in relation to wherever
I happen to find myself?