A query for you

When you say, “the end of the universe,”

Do you mean an all-encompassing apocalypse

Or a place where a sea of stars hits a wall

Of cement and impenetrability?

Which end do you see fit for me?

Where did you hope I’d end up?

Luckily, for you, I’ve found both

I outran an apocalypse

Of shrapnel and crashing crafts

Then another

Of microcosms and mutated air

And another

Of hunger so primal it drove people beyond reason

Beyond fraternity

Beyond humanity

Creation evaporated at my tailcoat

Wherever I landed my tiny red retro rundown ship

Suns turned terminal

Cores crumbled

Skies sank

And fuming, furious me

Meeting those like you

And seeing eyes like those set in your head

Those tears I averted

I was your cold traveler

Moving too quickly, thinking too large

To notice those little things

The splinters and ricochets

That my climbing catalyzed

Leaving me in absence

Balmy room-temp voids by my side

Crowning me the last one standing

Always awing astral ashes

Always pushing and poisonously progressing

Always striving to say a singular sentence

I made it

Until all din and discord swelled

Blossoming into antithesis

A red wave that enveloped stone and star

Coming this way

And all ways

Always

Now there are no more worlds to use as rungs

No galaxies there to transcend

No lives left to trivialize

There are only the red wave and the wall it is destined to crash into

The wall on which I now rest my livid laurels

A wall endlessly high and low and wide

A slightly protruding edge, acting as a dock

Where stands a white-hot lantern

The only light in the void-like surface

It illuminates a titanic sign translated in all five million languages

From Aramaic to Zyzyxian

“No more left. Turn around to see creation.”

And I turn, leaning against my ship’s hull

To see the red

Only two, three miles away

I reminisce of destruction

My destruction

The actions needed to rise here

So I can say

I made it

Not acts of catacombs and catastrophes

But little slices and screams

That composed of everyday micro-apocalypses

I expel them like fine sand

And I see those stressors of you and you and you

And even the one here at the keyboard

I breathe and pulse and become all of it

Snide comments

And spiking rents

Schedule conflicts

Familial rifts

The silences between the compliments

The judging without relent

Slit gazes when leaving their house

Passing over names we can’t pronounce

Rotted, hollow promises

Cyanide-like kisses

He doesn’t know

She doesn’t know

They don’t need to know

Don’t accept no

Never let your weakness show

Just keep your head low

That’ll let me really glow

Like the sunset

Like the son’s set

Of musical renditions

You miss time and time again

You’ll be better next time, though

You’ll make it to his next show

He doesn’t need to know

That it all came down to this

That it all turned to red

And I can feel the heat of the wave

I wonder what it will be like

Collision

A meeting

After all this time of running, surviving

To be pinned down is to reach a destination

The humming, cold lifelessness of the wall

And I sigh because as the sparks of the end singe my pocked face

I can say at least one thing

I made it

I made it here

And I made all that

And I’m the last one to hear me say it