And Another Apocalypse by Christian Butterfield
I wanted the world to end without an ending.
And Another Apocalypse
— After Angels in America by Tony Kushner I respected the delicate ecology of my delusions; I mistook it for Rapture. If God abandoned us, I abandoned Him first. Ha! Book of Revelatio– I skimmed it. Got bored of biblical. And did I hallucinate the angel’s billion-eyed airstrike? I acid-tripped into Aleph: a firebomb squad I called anything but death. Glittering death. I doomscroll: baby-amputees, carbon-sinks. I stop & I shouldn’t. Took sixty-seven shots; I chugged gasoline & transformed into AK-47. I woke from that stress-dream into another. I prayed. God served moldy loaves. Rank fish. I gobbled it up, pretended to puke. At age 10, I hyperfixated on the apocalypse. Seriously, I imagined myself as Katniss Everdeen. Ha! I wanted the world to end without an ending. I progressed like a tumor. Terminal, crazy & I mean, I was too young to believe in sickness. I refused to drown in the poisoned ocean. But I fished in it. Caught botulism from bad beef. I deregulated. Free market and I’m worthless. I star-spangled my coffin then refused to die in it. I lost my voice to the rocket’s red glare. Damn! I forgot imagination can’t create anything new. I took my time. I took dollar-store painkillers & I woke up groggier, less capable. Less possible. I tough-loved the world until it loved me back. I paid my taxes. I believed in it: our goodness. I do. I still do. I can’t tell if that’s a lie. Perhaps I could call myself oracle. Oh, what a shitshow! I wound up as oracle? World’s shittiest prophet? I refuse Rapture and Heaven. Enter Angel: Hark! I Arrived! Great Work Begins! Anti-apocalypse, I believe in you. So forgive me! But you can’t! I witnessed the flies rotting in the corpses, then I heard grown men laugh at the sight of it. Ha! I will do the great work! God willing, I will try! I felt God spit in my face & I kissed his cheek. I’m not brave.
Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Christian Butterfield, wherein he discusses writing about autism, the apocalypse, and making space for humor in grief. About this, he says:
“Well, I think about humor when I write about anything. On the structural/mechanical level, any joke is a poetic act. The best poets are stand-up comedians. Humor is often my entryway into a poem; I write to make myself giggle (and I’m great at giggling). The question inevitably becomes more complicated as it pertains to grief, because it’s hard to know if my humor gets me closer or farther from feeling what I feel. It’s hard to even know what I feel, but I do know what I find funny. I’ll just say this: Poetry is one of the only places I really let myself engage with my father’s memory.”
Wow! I almost missed that ending because of the way it was isolated, and even without it, it was a wow.
As a playwright who has taught this play (and stood in silent awe in an elevator alone with Kushner, and wrote a poem about that, and yes, I am autistic) I love every atom of this poem. We must all do the great work!