In the beginning, rivers flooded the chasms, 

And born out of the streams was Pandora,

miserable, shameful, lying on the floor. 

So quickly went the Pax Romana, a shot heard around the world, two Elizabethan ages. 

It’s all gold, gilded, gone. 

Literature only as leverage, Dickens or Dickinson? 

The Enlightenment eliminated any excuse for being naive and 

Now no one can fall in love. 

Curie won the Nobel and comically died from radiation. Curie-inspired since the womb, you were born like penicillin was. 

Unexpected, but all the more miraculous. 

Oh No! Now socialism is on the rise. New conservatism pledged itself to freedom when

Berlin reunited, and in the year 1989 the Earth truly began to burn. 

Not until the year of our lord 2020, 

you lay on the floor with saran wrap tight around your waist, miserable, shameful.

Inhibited, unknowing of the works of Chekhov and Tolstoy,

seemingly unworthy of grandeur, you found solace in Jane Austen instead of us. 

Then we found out and oh how you cheated them. 

You conjured the floods, kissing joints and friends 

while turning our eyes away from God. 

I think you’ve been dead for a while now, 

And I’m pretty sure that’s why you’re so captivated by the Bolsheviks. 

Crying about the death of Latin, wallowing in our pretentiousness.

Still consciously shrinking, but happy as can be together. 

Still trying to overcome my condition of sparking lies as wildfires. 

No longer writing tragedies and basking in our potential. 

In search of natural novocaine, renouncing then committing again to religion, writing odes to Alcott And Brontë. Head light, dresses no longer white, and passionate prose.

Finite holes in my memory, all my cards on the table, waiting for you to resurrect. 

Fearing only the unremarkable and terribly dull, you drowned. 

And now everything is pale in comparison.

In the end, I was not swallowed by the floods, 

I stepped right into them looking for you.