Midnights After the End of the World


Whenever I touch my eyes, they itch
That's the first problem I have with living here
Second is I'm dreaming, constantly, about bathtubs.
And every day there's something new inside
Yes, I said day, and every day's a night.

Every dawn I shut the drapes and pull
The slatted blinds across the outside of them,
And in the darkened day I dream of claw-foot bathtubs
And things that come up from the unlit drain
Things with wings that twitch and crawl, and children
And things that wrap too tight around my legs

Every night I'm up to watch the sunset
And as it falls I step outside my door
To see that from the balcony the city spreads,
all glittering beneath my  tightened hands
(and over it glides creature after creature
Stranger than my bathtub-dreams, transmuted things)
And when they're close perhaps I hear them sing
(They sound like flutes.)

My allergies have been constant since the move
(I used to live in light, and was… a priest?
It seems a life away, I don't recall.
And if I was who knows what I believed.
But since I came, I've spoken less and less
(with no one to speak to, I guess that's natural
At least I thought I'd someday think it natural)
And all around me, this place decays
The piano crumpled into soggy mold
The library books have long since flown away
But here I'll stay and sneeze and dream of bathtubs
And hush
And laugh sometimes to keep the light at bay.