We walk through the valley of death teeth chattering and bared, ready for fight or flight or the strange dangerous dance of mating. I go speaking myself again and again like the cry of a ravenous hawk. Tasting evanescence Eventually the sun darkens, sure. Eventually the oceans boil dry and the air thickens to smut. But long before that, the silencing.
Paper crackles into confetti.
Discs become obsolete. Poems in Wordstar and Multimate corrode in junked computers. Poems in Etruscan and Indo-European in the lost languages of the lost tribes of the California mountains, the male and the female languges throats slit bones burned, dust blowing inscribe letters no one is left to read, to say to fix the air into shapes of power or order. Somewhere through the black matter between the burning stars poems are rushing toward us in languages we cannot decipher from planets dead as the moon. All I can be sure of is this moment of saying when the words rise like champagne bubbles in my throat.