Artifacts
When they come for us, we will be ready.
Who knows how long before they can breathe our air or enter our atmosphere?
They will find us skeletal or mummified— those fortunate enough to not be ash.
Around us there may be evidence of what we held dear: photographs in wallets or purses, cell phones sputtering images or texts, watches or jewelry given as gifts, bearing inscriptions they might decipher.
They will leave us in our graveyard to be studied by scholars—not tourists. There will not be enough to make a Pompeii. Those of us who still have skulls will smile eternally, and they will assume we died happy.
Thoughts at a Diner
The song begins the moment your omelet arrives.
“Winds of change,” the singer intones over
and over. You imagine a stadium
full of fans thrilled at the genius
of such a deep, poetic, insightful line.
You’d be laughed out of any poetry workshop
for daring to present such a stale cliché.
Even if you tried to freshen it up—
a vast scirocco of time battering us,
those before us, those after us—
the staleness would stink up the room.
Even if your poem gets published,
at most a hundred people will read it.
Millions will hear that song—yet
eventually it will fade as dozens
of new insightful geniuses appear.
The lone and level sands stretch well past
the first Billboard 100,
the first Gutenberg press,
the first lyre or papyrus.
We are all our own Ozymandias.
Meanwhile, your omelet’s getting cold.
Three Nightmares
I.
You crawl from the wreck into a world of wrecks. The mangled steel blobs stand ten feet apart— no collisions, no fires, no corpses, no people. They stretch to the horizon across gray, flat concrete and brown, dead grass.
II,
Not from the bathtub but from the baseboard water seeps, then flows, not a busted pipe but a slashed artery. In a second the house is waist-deep in flood, a land-bound Titanic rocking and listing to port.
III.
Summer crowds cross the street. Your steering wheel and brakes dissolve. In a second you are smashed against a wall, the dead behind you. All sound ceases except for one voice: Your life is over, your life is over.
Miles David Moore founded the IOTA poetry reading series and hosted it from 1994 until its end in 2017. Since 2006 he has been film reviewer for the online arts magazine Scene4. From 2002 to 2009 he was a board member of the Word Works. His latest book of poetry, Man on Terrace with Wine, was published by Kelsay Books in October 2020.