oh how we live
in an automatic babylon
a pushbutton apocalypse on everyone’s thumb,
hovering over the POWER button on your
tv remote and mashing it down
to commit mass homicide on the
participants of the latest survivor show,
watching them be smashed by electricity’s
sudden entropy, a white hole at the centre of
your screen – faces squished unrecognizable
like a plane wreck, like people hanging
out of buildings half-in and half-out impaled
on the wicked and cackling shards of glass.
a cell phone is ringing in the rubble of
ground zero and
it is going unanswered.
at this distance it is so small it could be Barbie’s.
i will pick up and it will say
“hi, i want to go to the mall! wanna come?”
for a minute i will think she is a squeaky
prostitute asking me when i am going to come,
since i am obviously in that latter category of
generation-don’t-ask-y,
and we take our sweet time doing anything,
especially cleaning up
after ourselves