When the World Reversed Its Rotation
a poem
As originally appeared in the late, great “Thieves Jargon” online magazine, this poem touches upon the absurd, taking the “underside” of “Underside Stories” to the extreme!
When the World Reversed Its Rotation,
gravity everted to a centrifuge. The sea rained
upon the sky and little girls dashed to the sun
like Superman. Cabs and cribs and carousels
vying on the verge of space and me clutching
nothing at all. The axis grinds, and I don't care.
The sun was maestro, earth a carnival
ride, and the world flipped upside down so grass
was sky. I walked amidst the trees now
clouds with a wombat by my side, just he
and I, and I and he, and neither of us watched
fire trace the contours of the faces in the violet
smoke pressed against the atmosphere by sunlight
expelled but never free. Lay beneath a willow tree
hanging up to praise the violent sky. Who wonders how
a tree trades a planet's pull for light, stretching for the sun?
We slowly breathed the thinning air in darkness
draped in light. The violet ring grew wider,
and everyone was dead. The wombat floated away
like a knotted balloon. I sank into the turf and gazed
at ethereal sunset bold beyond the bloated canopy.
The world stopped and the ring collapsed
into suspension, hovering over my head like pianos
on pulleys and angry hornets. The violet turned to orange
and I looked for my wombat in the dangling rubble,
but all I found were the remnants of a home.
The world resumed and the sky cracked, it rained
as shells and twisted metal splinters. The weight of trains
and traffic lights broke the poles. Oceans rained
in torrents and continents reformed in ribbons.
Rivulets swelled into ravines and interred
all the world beneath its fury. The earth was alive,
I could hear her song beneath the falling seas as I
ascended past the womb of thunder, milked the clouds
for cosmic dust. I sailed through rays of an imperious sun,
roasted in brilliant blackness until I, too, had died.
There! How’s that for a cheery ending? See you next time on the Underside!