oh beast! nightmares of sheep. goats. fire that sinks like water.

We wait.
I may be here when they lock the doors.

I am here to tell someone about the rate of attrition 
how at dusk

all the people disappear.

I live on the hippest street in the nation
Or the second hippest if you are thinking about the other one I don’t know its name myself although I think I know where it is.
Unless it is someplace else.
But I am certain that my street is hipper than any street there could ever be.

Point being there are always a number of people within a hundred yards of me.
Heading in.
Heading out.
Passing through.

Those that I would or have invited to stay for a moment, though.
persistence is agnostic of all of me and so
I place it upon you
a halo
and its displaced space
almost a dent
a trough
where
for a short time
light will chase its tail
ink-tipped
ravenous

They disappear or that is at dusk I am struck with all of their vanishings at once whether or not anything of note happens to occur wherever they are or were or I imagine them to be. The hush is quite nearly devastating the sidewalks bright and empty the sky congested with shadows horsemen without weight or volume nearly almost partially blocking the sun.

As far as I can tell nobody besides myself feels the chill or is it the uptick in humidity yet entire cities vanish some half century ago the heavenly curtain was to be ripped open it would be for certain or for completely unpredictable but certainly soon but unexpected the great surprise predicted with all assurance whole populations slipping quietly from this earth with an ear-splitting shout TOO LATE or SUCKS TO BE YOU DUNT IT except it would not be everyone only the very holiest airplane captains and the crew also if they all of them were really really really truly baptized the single correct way but even some of those would turn out to have done it all wrong and somehow although their true numbers were meager the disaster would be large enough to be disastrous airships abandoned left and right passengers consigned to the collective gravity of their own worldly sins centered as it is within Lucifer’s own playground all the headless planes converge deep in the earth depositing the unwashed directly into the lake of fire below our feet.

Your feet. My feet.
That was a faster trip than I expected.
Oh we have been waiting for you. Waiting and waiting.

I may have been eight when I learned of this freight train of a rapture the one bearing down with all arrested haste as it had already for the hundred fifty-ish years since it was sifted out of the King James Bible with all the hermeneutic ingenuity one could hope to find in an American preacher. My family had not mentioned anything about it yet but early in the school year a Jack Chick tract somehow landed on the windowsill of my fourth grade classroom and as it was made of words and pictures I had no power not to pick it up I would and did and still do read shampoo labels and pill bottles if they appear in arm’s reach along with a moment to fill but this pamphlet existed only to be read thus I trusted it all the more to be rewarding and useful but instead the little comic was almost terrifying only too confusing at first to be quite so. It told of a cosmic endgame of unbridled divine revenge and posed it without any reason I knew of in the place of a future I had not yet even thought about because the other five billion billion possibilities had always been open and always would be unless they were about to be unceremoniously mowed down beheaded strafed pulverized and buried.

Because god was really mad about..

something. To this day none of the excuses offered neither the simple ones nor the sophisticated have ever been anything but exasperating. Arbitrary. Stark naked all resentment and fear hanging out swollen just past the point of restraint so that you cannot decide whether to laugh or run. 

I took the leaflet home. Mom would know if this stuff was true or real or anything I needed to worry about she explained things all the time and it was clear to me then that she already knew everything I would ever need to know.

It was. Something to worry about. Or it would be. I vaguely recall being told I could put off this worry until some time a little later that I would know was the time because it would be the time and I would know by then I would not have to ask I would just know it which indecipherable moment would shortly become the focus of vicious ellipses of thought so quietly insistent how was I to know then the howling the shrieking the twisted diamond bits exquisitely drilled years they were on tight fine points of doubly bound preacher’s logic.

Time was on their side. They would wait as long as they had to but no longer a couple of decades would make for a vast polish of precision-ground glass. One note so high nobody heard it not me not you not anyone still living. Every now and again I find a shard still singing as though it had landed not an hour before.

I am ahead of myself or I would be if I knew where to go to get there.

But I don’t remember much else about the truly bad news that was to get so much worse and for so long only I recall crawling on her lap for some sort of reassurance. The memory ends there. A vague hint of
shock like that was not what I came up here for oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Where will I go now where do I wait.
Could it be time yet.
How about now.

The rest of that fall is a nighttime serial in which I try to cry myself to sleep over and over and over and over but there is exhuasted crying because you have just had enough of the day and there is I cannot sleep with this unbearable knowledge and

there is no unknowing
and
there is no.

There just was not.

I was unable to say what the problem was when asked. Someone would rub my back while I pretended to fall asleep because I could not explain why that was not working either. What comfort could they possibly offer–clearly they had no more power than I to change the ending of this weird-ass stage play we had all been born into without ever once asking. So I stayed still as they left my room. Sleep would come eventually to swallow the ruined cosmos for a little while. By spring I could see that no crying of mine would bring it back to life and so I gave up.

I could not explain that gods plan had drained life of sense and replaced it with a terrible and ruthless joke. All of the color all of the motion all of the life all of the music the running water the rocks and hills and the grass the forests awash in moss and echoes of every breeze every hoof every breath the taking flight and sitting still all of that for one question. One lousy question and the majority of all of this and all of us would flunk.

It did not matter to me that I did not have to worry for myself right then. Add me to the damned biomass of Earth or subtract me: it made no significant difference in the overall volume of the final kill that would not even be final but ongoing and ongoing and ongoing until even a blind idiot god would have to signal somehow that enough was enough as the balances toppled lopsided with recompense.
I understood this then but could not have said even to myself what it was I understood. Besides which understanding could not overcome my absolute inability to disbelieve what my mother told me. My eight was your six besides who at eight is able to back themselves like that to walk unassisted like that to give themselves the benefit of the doubt like that.

I knew. I knew that I knew.
And I knew that it was not possible to go on knowing.

I had to fold.

It was the end
not the beginning of the end
not the end of the end
all of the end all of it
For once and for all

This would not be the last one
but it was the last one where
I was allowed
to maintain that
nobody had warned me.