repeated: I hold this poet hostage to write my ending. there is no ending without the poet there is no poet without a collapse imminent, there is no me without a broken branch to write into a sword.
the catacomb of last kisses, which you did not realize were lasts, and which you regret not knowing were lasts.
it is not your fault. you did not know the world was ending – neither did we. this is not the ending we expected and bomb shelters cannot help us now. what I wouldn’t give for another week of sunrises, hell, another week of public busses and dinner at the bar in our backyard. when she kissed me goodnight, I didn’t know it was the last goodnight I’d pass, here. if only someone had warned me, I would have stayed awake all night by her side and spilled the coffee from my mug just to have an excuse to strip the sheets and run the laundry one last time
oh, to wait for the slowly creeping dryer curled in blankets that smell like the fleece sheets do when you pull them from the closet after the first frost, after a year of waiting. to brew one more pot of coffee and watch one more sunrise together, knowing it would be the last. to know that, however short, this has been the finite end
and we face it together. but this morning, I got up before the sunrise and dressed in the dark. I watched the light creep over the horizon through the cracks in the blinds. I kissed her cheek and whispered a goodbye she won’t remember. I watched the sun overtake the sky from the bus stop, rode the bus into the city with my headphones in, and spent the last moments before the true end of the world serving coffee to strangers. I regret tramping down that desire to say fuck it and climb back into bed, in the dark, next to her. at the end, tell me who to plead with and I will argue until the sunlight finally fades, for our last chance meeting under a dying sky.
addendum: I don’t mind the end of the world, I just want the certainty that comes in knowing when a goodbye is a goodbye.
you have come to end. this is goodbye.
Monica Robinson is a Philadelphia experimental poet, fiction writer, and artist. She combines mediums to create fresh works of exploratory literature and unique speculative horror-folklore fiction pieces, partially inspired by the strange small town in which Monica was raised. You can find her work at www.mrobinsonwrites.com.
Twitter: @mxnicarobinson
Instagram: @corvus.et.liber
Facebook: mrobinson7272