übermensch Odaoda Odogoro

übermensch

Odaoda Odogoro

Here Comes Rubie Jamie, the Beginning of a Great Career, & Other Ways to Think About the End of the World

Kiersten Kiara Wright

(For my ancestors, at once dead and alive)

We should just think of it like The waltz at the end of the world— A high-school homecoming dance Where the DJ only plays unreleased ABBA And all my unfinished poems set to a lyre— So now we all have an excuse to wrap ourselves In a few yards of abbey-cream-colored chiffon With nothing underneath and pretend it’s a toga— And it’s the last day of the empire of everything, Which means it’s the last day of my period, So I don’t care anymore if Mother Nature Slaps a rosso corsa Rorschach to my ass—

Because the end of the world is Mutually assured destruction— And if any time is the time To practice Cold War politics, it’s now, On the dawn of another ice age— When the thought of our frigid and blue bodies Will eventually cajole us into kinship and kumbaya, So we can do whatever we please to appease The id iceberg that lurks in every one of us— Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot—

I know the end of the world is The day we finally get to meet the person, Dead or alive, we once told a date we’d like to dine— Because, now, I’m munching on hors d’oeuvres

With Walt Whitman on a post-colonial Pangaea And rocketing a middle finger into space As I roar, That’s for capitalism and the way It extracted free labor from us at self-checkout lines!— We’re hunched over, howling, as I bring it back down To orbit my bottom lip and wipe up the bruschetta And beer mixture slopping out my mouth And tumbling down my chin—

I guess you could say, then, the end of the world is Something like a Madisonian dialogue— Like how he wrote letters to Congress as Washington And wrote letters to Washington as Congress— Just having a tête-à-tête with two sides of ourselves, Trying to describe the foreign place we’re going But won’t know until we’ve gone— We’ll identify each other by our emotional scars there Since they’ll be our birthmarks when bodies sublimate— Save Our Souls, Save Our Souls, Save Our Souls—

Sometimes I like to think of this as My final chance to chase the midday moon back After it pursued me all those years I rode in a backseat— My last chance to catch falling stars without fear Their twinkling tails will prick the tip of my pointer Like my grandma’s sugar tester— The moon was always mounted so low, Her sugar was always a little bit high— We won’t be around for the full moon murders Or diabetes biohazards anymore, Because the world is going down in Dada and dementia, But I do hope we remember it all in the next lifetime—