So, I guess it is my lot
to console
the widow of the world.
The once admired bride of lauded human achievement.
It was hubris,
for us to think we were the world;
for the world was here
long ago, when we were not.
But now,
the old Sawbones
has declared him dying.
Nothing we can do now,
but wait for him to expire
and comfort his grieving widow.
The one that everyone thought
was so beautiful,
but after time
no one really likes anymore.
It somehow falls to me;
the job of rendering
all the hollow platitudes
I can muster
and transforming my body
into endless shoulders
to cry on,
to lean on,
but I really stopped caring
so long ago.
The nurse comes in,
she cares less than I do.
Says she has seen
cases like this
draw on for a few
hundred million years.
The world has been long in dying
and perhaps we might prefer
to go home
and someone will call us
if there are any changes.
My charge makes no move for the door,
but instead,
buries her insufferable head
into the crook of my fourth shoulder
and makes blubbering and sucking sobs
that we all know aren’t genuine,
and the old world just stays
as it is,
as it was
and as it will be.
Time,
we don’t have much,
he and I.
We’ve been here before
and we’ve bet against fate
and won and lost
a few thousand times
over the millennia.
I hold the not-yet-widow close,
while I look out the window
and see nothing
that would tell me that the world is dying.
Perhaps this is a simulated picture
and I have been deceived?
I don’t have it in me
to care anymore, anyway.
So, we’re standing here,
waiting for the world to end
and there isn’t a truly sad
person in attendance.
Not with a bang,
no,
not even a whimper.
HG – 2016
