Homemade Apocalypses

#1
Driven by indefinite predators, you run
through the multistoried city puzzled together
like a colossal le Corbusier parking garage, leap
knotted streets threaded through with gurgling
orchestrated streams. Traffic fog stands
in pillars of light and shadow like fluctuating
headlights cutting through an ancient forest,
casting dirty Jacob’s Ladders, beaming
from low hanging firmaments of grey concrete.
Unable to escape, peer off the edge
of architectural monstrosity, this last Wonder,
witness a vista of Trump Tower-sized cubes
of refuse baled together with twists of iron twine,
receding into the stinking distance, the horizon
a rusted Donald Judd sculpture of postindustry.

#2
Walking a hotel hallway without hurry,
your small herd of humans knows the earth change
not the way wild animals do, limbic, in bones
before brains, but—with nowhere to run
on earth from earth’s gorgeous shockwave—
by the way a giant new update of gravity
gently sucks you into slumped piles of yourselves,
the unknown babe in your arms at once slack faced,
like you, full of useless bones and bright-eyed
with collapse, the surprise of benign paralysis,
the premonition of a future anthropologist,
evolved android drawing you piece by piece,
scattered as you will be throughout the others,
taking notes on your precise whereabouts
when it all went down, a diagram of destruction.