Brian Hathcock
who?
A pickaxe to the heart,
a small dog torn apart by germs,
or, perhaps!, a baby worm squirming into my blood
proves, gently, that i will be nothing:
laughter blotched across the face of whatever might be this planet.
Comfort: Earth will live without Homo sapiens.
Were it painted in asphalt 1000 times,
a meteorite would plow the black cover,
another, another,
infinity,
until something green grows again,
and all flesh of people has become fossil fuel to be tapped by no one, ever.
Into the intestines of a spherical mass of dirt and magma,
like the brains of the happy extinct,
will be absorbed, crushed, mashed into sand and soil.
Haha! Praise any god, we are not here again.
This poem will not exist! Nothing
we have created will survive,
whether of stone, steel, digits, or thrown to outer space—
it will not last.
The insignificant planet, the dying universe, will not care
even as to the most valued achievement of bipedal slime.
No memory in any brain that might remain briefly
will contain a thought of mankind.
You, or i, might, as well, be a bullet
a rocket, a diamond,
as a thing of pulsing cells in water:
a neonanosecond in a nonexistent clock,
which we invented in one century as we believed ourselves worthy.
A profiled feature on one of a million-page lexicon:
sublimated! for all the universe might care.
We were faded blemishes. Not forgotten!
To be forgotten is to have been recognized, seen;
the human beings of planet Earth were nothing
but one faltering sperm in the trillions
unaccounted for within a googol flocks
of a googolplex decaying testes:
vestiges of spasms briefly noticed as byproducts.
October 9, 2004
who?
A pickaxe to the heart,
a small dog torn apart by germs,
or, perhaps!, a baby worm squirming into my blood
proves, gently, that i will be nothing:
laughter blotched across the face of whatever might be this planet.
Comfort: Earth will live without Homo sapiens.
Were it painted in asphalt 1000 times,
a meteorite would plow the black cover,
another, another,
infinity,
until something green grows again,
and all flesh of people has become fossil fuel to be tapped by no one, ever.
Into the intestines of a spherical mass of dirt and magma,
like the brains of the happy extinct,
will be absorbed, crushed, mashed into sand and soil.
Haha! Praise any god, we are not here again.
This poem will not exist! Nothing
we have created will survive,
whether of stone, steel, digits, or thrown to outer space—
it will not last.
The insignificant planet, the dying universe, will not care
even as to the most valued achievement of bipedal slime.
No memory in any brain that might remain briefly
will contain a thought of mankind.
You, or i, might, as well, be a bullet
a rocket, a diamond,
as a thing of pulsing cells in water:
a neonanosecond in a nonexistent clock,
which we invented in one century as we believed ourselves worthy.
A profiled feature on one of a million-page lexicon:
sublimated! for all the universe might care.
We were faded blemishes. Not forgotten!
To be forgotten is to have been recognized, seen;
the human beings of planet Earth were nothing
but one faltering sperm in the trillions
unaccounted for within a googol flocks
of a googolplex decaying testes:
vestiges of spasms briefly noticed as byproducts.
October 9, 2004