everyday apocalypse
I’m a zombie in the morning
I wake up and don’t even know what I am
everything somehow feels unfamiliar
even though I’ve done this a million times…
the alarm is a neurotoxin, feeding caustic
signals to my auditory cortex,
and my eyes refuse to adjust —
rods, cones—they’re all fucked up
no color to this AM routine — all shadows
and grey and nearsightedness, hey
at least the sun comes up quick in the
summer mornings — longer days
are a mild consolation to the early riser,
for he knows there will still be daylight
once we all emerge from our collective nightmares—
I am rising from the darkness, but not
in a good way — I am so un-alive, saggy flesh
and all — I am a zombie of the morning,
like the walking dead but boring…
shit, piss, feed the cat, shave, dress, hair
teeth, pack lunch, try not to leave my PJs
on the bathroom floor — contact lens insertion
is sometimes the hardest part, because the eyes
are not ready yet, but it’s so tough out there
and even a corpse like me needs to see…
or smell, I smell all the coffee that’s out there
in the world, all of it that I can no longer drink
and it feels like a reminder of the life that has left
my body, how it still exists in the world but it is
all outside my reach, outside my bite,
outside my realm — because I now feast at the
dead end of this bullshit extreme, this simulacrum
of everyday life, this mundane and pedestrian
existence — hell has not taken over…
