Knox Pull the Lid Off
Do you know the meaning of Apocalypse
in the original Greek? I looked it up once
at the library in Fairview, Tennessee,
while passing through:
to pull the lid off. To reveal things
for what they are.
People talk about The Apocalypse
like it’s one event, a fixed point
in the sky around which satellites orbit,
drawing nearer with each pass
until eventually they’ll be consumed.
I know different. That it’s Apocalypses.
A chronic disease that haunts
your life and flares up every so often,
usually when you’re most comfortable.
Say when you’re seven, and your mom rouses you
at 2:36 a.m. and tells you to be very quiet;
that you’re leaving
but your father isn’t coming and the stillness
at that hour is too impossible to be
anything but a dream, so you go without complaint
but then you awake in a nest
of musky blankets at the back of a rattling school bus
with most of the seats removed and filled
with strangers, the road reek of diesel prickling
your nose as the herald of the end of your old life
and beginning of your unmoored new.
Or when you finally turn eighteen in a KOA campsite
in northern Michigan, which you celebrated
with a yellow cake salvaged from a Meijer dumpster that said
in blue frosting, Happy Retirement, Penis!
(I hope you got a corrected cake, Denis, and happy retirement)
and you can suddenly appear back in society
without too many questions and so you go, go in the night
like you did once, go like a ghost, go like a thought
leaving your mind, end your old life
like someone once did for you.