The Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy

 

When I’m dead, I’ll be eating mold spores, pine cones, sheaves of discarded paper. Or so I predict. I’m hours away from the door, years away from my next trip to the grocery store. The sun rises in the east like a Sumerian charioteer with bad news about the fate of Western Civilization.

 

I look out the window and think, My eyes of half a century grow weary of the dawn and immediately I feel ashamed. Gulls scavenge the rooftop puddles, miles from a reasonable body of water. Their cries are the sound of a soul’s rusty hinges.

 

If I think of it as meditation, my bed sores seem noble. I’m saint-like, therefore the long hair and beard. So what if I’m the king of the giant hamsters? Won’t someone fashion me a proportionate wheel? And by the way, that’s not a scream forming on my mouth, it’s a yawn. Though even I have trouble determining the difference.

 

The sun keeps insisting like a speed-freak panhandler who tells me his car has run out of gas. Yes, the merciless sun approaches. I’m immobilized by the daily bloodletting, the prayers that fall on deaf gods’ ears. In any case, I know the future. It’s predictable. It ends as it began, a complicated situation brought to light.

New York Tyrant Vol. I No. III