We have all wished to be covered // After everything explodes

In Texas a Baby is Born Without Skin.

We have all wished to be covered.

You dare air. So there are surgeries

for you. Peach fuzz. Leather.

A hardcover's dust jacket. We try growing some 

for you in the lab. 

Underneath the carpet 

lives a kingdom of dust. You sneeze.

And in an old house

the roofslates keep sliding down

while we worry that the sky is falling. 

The sky is falling. 

A landlocked country celebrates this,

their hands upturned to the rain, their prayers

answered. The sky

is falling. Above the Arctic circle

a hole grows in the ozone. Its air is pretty. 

Beneath it, the ice glitters wetly. A wound. 

You cry. You are packaged by nurses.

Your organs are canvassed by bandages. 

Your colours bloom like a cracked mirror.

You are opened. You are three-dimensional.

We sink our hands into you. 

There is something inside you, 

and there our eyes are 

swallowed. A beaten samurai's blade

finds himself and his colours too bloom.

Like you, he is opened. Was it choice,

to find oneself peeled? Was it your hands?

When you were packaged by your mother,

where were your hands?

What were your hands?

Where were your hands before this air seeped

into your fingers? And the hurt, from where

this roaring hurt

of knifeless cuts, of groundless scabs

fresh with falling? Where

were your hands before you were 

first found, glittering and bloodless

as a seashell? 

You were waiting. Tinned.

A sonograph questioned your contents. 

Then beneath your mother's legs,

strange shore,

your small feet waded. You leap.

You are born and on the news.

***

Will Everything Be Okay In The End?

After everything explodes or

after everything implodes when

all seven planets line up

perfectly together straight and

bugs transform into bigger bugs and

begin eating children and

embryos rip out of wombs with 

baby nails like talons and 

my head ceases 

its clouds, heavy and weird and 

grey-- After all of this, will everything be

okay? The missiles, will

every one of them making their way 

steadily into intergalactic 

atmospheres of war, will they turn

into birds instead? And jobs, will there be

enough for everyone because robots,

so clean, so ready, take 

Mondays through Fridays off to write

poems instead? In the end, 

will everything be “alright” or “just fine” or “it’s no big deal” or be 

glitterier

or just “meh”? Whatever

screams or silences of screams, will they become 

like music, or like the memory of music

and be resolved into floating, like air, like struggles

of vapour after kettles, or like children

blowing into plastic circles, soapy

with effort-- And there. The blowing goes

as spheres as crystals

as long as seconds before 

the quiet bursts.