Apocalypse in Aminor (Or The Self-Fulfilling End of Everything)
Right after I hit puberty
I became a prophet.
Most of my friends were just counting the hairs on their chins
or getting insecure about their pecs
But I was dreaming dreams of the end of the world.
At night, I was laying my head down on my pillow
my own little Patmos
and seeing into the future…
One night I was at Neal Middle School
and our class walked single file out to the buses
to a parking lot on fire.
Everything was burning politely,
the school, the neighborhood, the birds,
but not the buses.
We sat in our seats
leaned our little heads against the windows
and watched the world burn
waiting for our bus stop.
And Mrs. Parrish, our bus driver, had a mustache,
And guess what? It was on fire…
Another time the sun was walking across the city roofs
like granddaddy long legs
eating pigeons off of satellite dishes
and smoking trees like cigarettes.
The people stared in awe and took pictures
muttering prayers to themselves
and the pigeons and trees were muttering their own.
Some nights I would wake up and not remember
a thing, but I would feel epic
and vulnerable.
Another time I was the moon and I was angry.
I shook my fist at the earth
And I still don’t know why.
And another night I was sitting in the back seat
and my father was shouting “Jesus is coming Jesus is coming!”
And the sky was a mirror stretched out over the earth
and it was opening its mouth, yawning.
In the last vision I remember
I sat and watched people gather in Times Square
on New Years.
my little head leaning against a dull window,
they were watching a Mayan king on a grand stage
remove the heart of Tim LaHaye.
The king pulled his hand from the chest
and raised a glowing disco ball in the air
and lowered it slowly
as the people counted down to zero.
And out of the mouth of the sky
a flash of light and graffiti,
Then
there was nothing.
In my dream, the voice of Morgan Freeman boomed
out of the blankness:
“And the end came because they believed it would.”
I would wake up from these dreams and know that I knew something
that no one else did.
