They say, my dear, the end of the world is imminent,

The signs are clear,

And groups gather under the lampposts

In the doorways of their homes,

Facing the ever-glowing screens of their phones.

They want to bear witness

When the world explodes

Like a soap bubble in the infinite universe.

We’re deeply concerned, my dear,

The seas rage, and a plague looms near.

No, they haven’t grasped it; they await the second coming

Like Pharisees,

How many times have I been on the street, hungry and shivering,

And you didn’t give me food, and I was a stranger in your land,

Or I was ill with no hospital,

Homeless, utterly vulnerable, and still, you don’t recognize it?

The trebuchets of an army shatter a besieged city to pieces,

Walls, battlements, and turrets fall,

The bellows and the forge roar like a demon beneath war machines,

And there, the grinding of teeth and the end of the world wrapped in radiation and fuel.

And we, dear, are becoming Abaddons of ourselves, waiting for judgment,

Cynically enslaving the Lord while we insist He is the one coming in that cloud of radiation,

They say, dear, that the birds will cease to sing

And the forests will wither away,

The future frees us from the dreadful present.

We’ve hung the millstone around our necks,

Enslaving the little ones in Pakistan, China, Vietnam,

On the streets of La Habana and Caracas, in the jungles of Ecuador and Colombia,

And since then, we’ve done nothing else

Than ensure we’ll be judged in the voluptuousness of our salons,

We sweat the wave of progressivism mixed with the alkaline dose of fentanyl.

We are so broken,

So utterly broken, and still, we await the end,

An apoteosis, we avert our eyes from El Bosco’s triptych,

We cover our ears to avoid hearing Bach’s baroque.

The waves of fire grant us front-row seats,

To witness the Son of Man descending on the clouds,

Clouds of smoke, gunpowder, gasoline, and radiation.

Then, dear, the curtains will fall, and we will applaud,

In the narrative of a world on the brink.