day FOURTEEN HUNDRED and THIRTY ONE

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

there are cracks forming in the shell of this world,
forming in our sleep, and we don’t always see
them when we wake, when we work, when we
try to love and hurry and slow it all down and
suddenly we glance up, pause in place, and
there they are, a hairline fracture in the ceiling,
a suture in the wall, the house lilting just a bit,
just barely visible if you look hard, so hard,
but, hey, it’s fine, everything will be fine,
right? if we just leave it like that? there’s no
emergency, it seems to be holding itself upright
and the Tower of Pisa has been that way for
age upon age, so who’s worried about one more
filament of space and time broken away to dust?
one more shred of democracy? one more ounce
of human decency poured into the sewer drain?
and so we look away from our walls, we look away
from the cracks in our ceiling, and one day we
leave that place for another, a place with white
walls and good Thai food, a place with better WiFi
and a casual sense of anonymity, just another
animal evading extinction until the chain of command
loses link after link, crack after crack, and the tide
begins to lap at our ankles, waves rushing in as we
stand on the peak of the world holding our iPhone 15 up
to the sky begging for help as the satellites pass by,
glimmering amongst the garbage and stars until
even they melt in the brilliant embrace of the sun

--James Duncan