How to Survive A Surrealist Apocalypse
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
It is usually best to avoid
crushing hopelessness, to swerve
and defer disaster, but even so
the world is well and truly fucked up.
Seek solutions to this conundrum.
Try to avoid curiosity, a pernicious
strain of insanity that conjures up
irrational fears of orangutans
with meat cleavers, lethally ascetic
Tibetan monks, bathroom carpets
of abandoned razors, or Big Macs
rife with E. Coli, Ebola or E anything.
Avoid metaphysical musings that lead
to questions of coleslaw, vegan
water parks, the Team Quadriplegic
Gymnastics squad, or the horrors
of the Hilary Clinton Naked Network.
Seek refuge in the present tense to
escape the interrogation of mirrors,
the crafted answer, dacryphilia,
remedial rage, landslides of therapy
and memorizing your horoscope.
Consider that mercy is on back order from God.
Remember the best lines of an unread book.
Nap on a battlefield; haggle over imaginary debts.
Set fire to the umbrellas of passing strangers.
Stop to watch the loudness and burn the recovered dead.
Call up new magic for a dying world.
Find beauty in the irradiated glow of burning cities.
Try not to bounce existential checks or notice
the crumbling of distant walls, ruined outhouses,
and the immense bleakness of forever and ever.
Take up training small rodents and lighting holy fires.
Ignore the broken stars, long dead and beyond grief.
Discover the pleasure in erasure, enjoy the biology
of strangeness. Walk many miles without a map
beneath innumerable ladders carefully detouring
around immense flocks of rabid cassowaries.
Throttle the recalcitrant blue sky’s silent throat.
Listen to the melody of car wrecks and smashed guitars.
Abandon assumed corpses to dreams of endless cold.
Appreciate futures you cannot believe in but never visit.
Learn to diagram sentences in Esperanto then speak with toads.
Ignore the slot machine odds against your deepest desires.
Hide beneath the ravenous trees from time’s famished maw.
Seek sanctuary in toothy optimism and complete amnesia.
Follow these impossible instructions to the letter
and you will become non-valent, invisible, immune,
no longer notice the world is a deep fried possum
and beyond redemption. Go on, give it a try.
Everything you had to lose is lost.
2016
