Twenty-Twelve

I was thinking it might be a relief
if the world ended
while we are still young.

We would not have to face art's poverty in age,
when, perhaps, fretting at grocery receipts
becomes intolerable. Nor would I have to compromise,

and labor to wring money out of some other stone,
but I could go blazing into the white country,
never veering from my vocation at the hem of life.

Nor would we fray, as age does, at not achieving
the secret pinnacle, because our trajectories
were stopped on the way up. Nor would I worry, then,

about my mutually exclusive unused womb
or unused dreams, where one must eat the other,
like foxes fighting in a hole.

Nor would we be surrendering of our own choice
to that best bravest godgiven battle of surviving,
if the entire earth blinked out.

Nor would I, of all horrors greatest,
have to stare down your particular mortality,
if I and all the everyone that's on earth perished too,
and I'd know life and death were good because I found you finally,
and simultaneously we could explore that foreign land
of colors so sharp they'd cut a mortal's skin.

But I expect it will not be so easy.