after Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

‍

It was all I’d been waiting for my whole little life
but I’d never survive it. I couldn’t afford
the tools. Yellowstone Supervolcano—
Silly to say, since no, I didn’t live nearly

within 1000 km of the caldera, but hear me 
out here: the ash would infect the clouds
and turn our lungs to concrete and boom!
I’d spontaneously combust into my own grave,

and nobody’d ever visit. Or Electromagnetic
Pulse— my Nintendo Wii would crash, and
I was a lonely child; lonely, half-stable and well
past the part where I was cute, and I deserved

to be lonely, so I couldn’t survive the Wii–
pocalypse. I tried a Faraday Cage.
But I quickly knew that I didn’t know
how a Faraday Cage even worked,

so for about two weeks I slept in aluminum
foil and begged Mom for silver coins,
as if I’d ever be any good at bartering.
Pandemics— I loved any type of illness

I could maybe avoid. That was my chosen
fantasy. Oh, every prepper chooses their ideal
apocalypse, as in: Dad wanted looters
to shoot and I got good at faking sick

so might as well fake healthy. Nobody else
wants a plague. On Doomsday Preppers,
nobody stockpiles for any of the real disasters
and honestly, I don’t blame them 

because I don’t think they’d actually survive it.
I think they’d play war-king in a community
garden, or they’d get shot with their own gun
and everybody’d be like: The apocalypse

‍of dipshittery just ended! Hooray! and they’d be right.
Like I said but couldn’t know; there’s other doomsdays,
like credit-card debt and staph infections,
and I’m still eating canned food, so what now?

I was a lonely child. I’m a lonelier adult.
The world wasn’t ending, but hey, I still stood
on the train-tracks with my eyes shut, and yes,
I feel melodramatic saying it like that, and yes,

I didn’t stand there for long, but long enough
to know: I’m no survivalist. 
Not even when it’s easy. Especially not when
it’s real. I can’t afford the tools, so sure,

go ahead and loot me. Just take it: 
The Faraday Cage. The clouds of dense ash.
The toy coins. The train-track. Four seasons
of Doomsday Preppers. My education.