Page 2 of Wayfarers

I had. I had. Anymore I feel like

a paper plane in a rainstorm.

Knox Pull the Lid Off

Do you know the meaning of Apocalypse

in the original Greek? I looked it up once

at the library in Fairview, Tennessee,

while passing through:

to pull the lid off. To reveal things

for what they are.

People talk about The Apocalypse

like it’s one event, a fixed point

in the sky around which satellites orbit,

drawing nearer with each pass

until eventually they’ll be consumed.

I know different. That it’s Apocalypses.

A chronic disease that haunts

your life and flares up every so often,

usually when you’re most comfortable.

Say when you’re seven, and your mom rouses you

at 2:36 a.m. and tells you to be very quiet;

that you’re leaving

but your father isn’t coming and the stillness

at that hour is too impossible to be

anything but a dream, so you go without complaint

but then you awake in a nest

of musky blankets at the back of a rattling school bus

with most of the seats removed and filled

with strangers, the road reek of diesel prickling

your nose as the herald of the end of your old life

and beginning of your unmoored new.