How the World Ends

As my eyes darken and the storm erupts inside my veins, you mistake my anger for passion, slide your hands around my hips and press me to you hard. My mind is a lightning rod of electric visions, none of them tender. To be alive at all in times like this is to exist inside a caricature of cruelty, the outside world has become a pornography of brutal harm. Women and children fleeing for their very survival in the desert, chased into madness by the callus greed of the rich and powerful men who own everything but most importantly they own the power to kill. Kill us. Destroy all of the things we worship and believe in as we scramble to understand what is even happening when it’s all happening too fast. You grab a fistful of my hair and firmly tug while kissing the soft skin of my exposed neck and in one deep exhale I try to imagine what it must feel like to die. To be on the other side of destruction, free of the fear. Do we still feel affection even after we cross over? Do we still know all the same things we know now but are they somehow neatly tied together in such a way that it all makes sense? You don’t ask yourself any of these things that I obsess over with near relentless hyper attention which may be why there are  times when you can get yourself off while all I can do is roll with it through the numbness. Who deserves pleasure, who deserves pain. Who deserves more of one or the other. As I drive to work with headlights peering through the hollow darkness down the same old road, I pass a deer on the side of the highway, headless. In the split second when I notice it I see only its wide stump of bloodied insides, then its beautiful young body limp, lifeless. We have been told there are too many deer and it’s a problem and it’s a shame. We have been told a lot of things are not as they seem. Violence is not violence, truth is not truth. What you see is not what you see. But who hits a deer with a car in such a way that the head comes clean off – and then disappears? A static voice on the radio speaks of the most recent catastrophic event on the other side of the globe. Hand grenades and the smiles on the laughing faces of the enemy. War is not war. Death is not death. Life is not life and this one’s not mine. I sip my coffee, and drive.