Not with a Bang

It is a cold, tired day. It is fallen, worn type of day, a cigarette butts drowning in puddles, mud running down sidewalks, shoelaces slapping soggy and frayed against your ankles type of day. Everything splashes, and everything soaks, and I am walking slowly, with my head down and my back bent beneath the weight of the cast-iron clouds, and I am muttering a poem that will probably disappoint me in the end, but it is lyrical, and it is helping me understand the way today feels, and I can no more ignore it than I can ignore the misery of cold rain on slumped shoulders. I don’t even know how it begins, but I keep repeating the refrain, because I am afraid of losing it to idle thought before I can set it down:

And everything wears down, love, everything wears down

That’s all I have, but I think I’m a poet anyway. I’ve thought that since I was very young, and a long time ago it ceased to be a privilege. It became a responsibility, as though the world had invested some spark of inspiration every time I set a word down, and if I did not set myself ablaze I had failed myself and I had failed the world, and since then I have not found myself inspired very much at all. A line runs through my head:

Like icy flint that throws its sparks on puddles of complacency

And it follows itself like right behind left

Or birth that sates itself of life though yet in early latency

And isn’t it though? Like a dull blade on cold stone, so strike the desperate throes of a tired spirit on failing flesh, and through all the promises and hopes, and over the rolling plains of exhaustion comes the dry breath of hopelessness, and with a sound like despair it turns the dust and ash over and over, and the smoke smells like concession, but you can never see the fire.

And everything wears down, love, everything wears down.

So the hot blood that coursed through burning veins, and seared the edges of the world browns and dries on gray shirtsleeves, and bleeds out again in the rain, and all our sharp edges are gone to slow curves like the pebbles in the street, or the faces behind the windshields that keep on crawling by. Another poem passes by my eyes. Not one of my own, one of someone else’s, who already did this poet thing, and made himself immortal, and then died

This is how the world ends

And I’ve never thought of it this way, of the world ending, not being ended. As though it tires like today, as though it went on being for a hundred million years and a hundred million more, crawling and walking and running and falling, hoping and loving and trying and failing and picking up the broken pieces of a hundred million beautiful things, again and again and again and again, until one day it caught one beat up sneaker in a rain-flooded pothole and just lay there and didn’t anymore.

Not with a bang, but a whimper