I did not fear the end of the world
Because I thought it would all go out with me,
And what would come next would be nothing or everything
Which had absorbed everything that had been or will be.
But everything was there the next day, and the next
Was filled with more, I'm sure, and even some less.
I did not want to die alone, and now I fear a faceless death
Delivered by a force or consequence which I could not even think to best.
The dead-skin rattle drones in the fringe;
Ash instead of children,
Rubble instead of houses.
They try to retighten the screws on the hinge;
Pits instead of gardens,
Rubble instead of houses.
Bodies piled, settling, crack the door open with a twinge;
Rock instead of trees,
Rubble instead of houses.
The blight that man was born for thickens the air with its dinge.
We mites on the snake all see the ass ahead
Hoping this time around we finally kill it dead.
The door I live behind is no longer red, but it is lighter.
Harder to lock and easier to slam.
Adorned with symbols which have lost all meaning
And guarding a piece of history clung to desperately despite the decay.
Drained of red, pale skin looks more yellowish-green,
Leaving like water drying, in puddles slowly shrinking.
But pale feet do not a dead woman make,
In her wake a scatter of plastic, so unlike the scatter of paper and little things
Which cover every surface that is not the floor.
My bed is always left unmade, she came home to a couch.
One night you find you cannot sleep for the
Kicking of your heart through your back against the sheets.
How can you trust your lungs to keep on breathing
When your wakened gasping belies their deceit.
Asleep or dead? That is the question.
Awake and terrified? That is a certainty.
But oh, isn’t it nice to be awake? Such a pleasure has not always been in high demand, Yet the invisible hand of the market moves as it will,
And if there is a clever economic analogy here it is adamantly omitted.
What is left of this fear?
From a distant and kinder non-reality
To an impatient, gnawing critter eating away at the night,
Scratching and throwing itself against the inside of my ribs, before mellowing out, Somewhat, to a faint hum of fear, jumpiness,
A renewed sense of anger.
A thrumming thread of spite,
And irritation,
At hypocrisy, and callousness,
And friends, same as family, in a way which has never been breached before,
And does scare me quite a bit more than the anger burns,
And then it starts to spit and die,
And when the rage all heads to a dead stop
And when seeming is hung like a hat on the wall
And when there's nothing left to say or have done
Everything will still be happening.
Our tragic little rock will eat itself alive–
Or if we’re lucky, the sun’ll do the work for us–
And it will be as beautiful on that day it ends
As the day that anything else begins.
And now its not so much fear,
As it is the small, respectful, still distant nod you give to a near stranger.
Maybe you met them through a friend, or a friend of a friend, or at a too large family gathering,
But there’s still no intention to make friends just yet.
Not just yet.
You remember then, that it’s not exactly up to you, but rather force and consequence,
And it might just be fear again,
Or maybe patience.
Scillian Raaf Panepinto is a sophomore Illustration major at the School of Visual Arts. They have long enjoyed writing in all its forms, and have attempted to mimic nearly all of them with varying degrees of success.