::: SKIDROW PENTHOUSE :::

THE 21ST CENTURY BLOOMS

As the last word
ever written
is scratched on a wine-stained napkin,
in an age after the death of the eight-track,
when the cassette is on its last legs,
and paper their predecessor
is so unworthy to hold words.

The last word because love is dead
and sex is best left alone--spare us
the diapers, Rugrats and,
a few years' down the pike, Squarepants.

This is the last word
from an old man whose idea
of correspondence has become nothing
more than deleting spam.

This is the last word because love
died with a perceptible groan
in a test of the emergency broadcast system
shortly following the Monica and Bill show.
The last word because words haven't
helped me seduce a woman in 15 years.
Silence has been so much more useful.

This is the last word because we have seen
the seed from which Yggdrasil grew,
we have stewed into perfume the sacred algae
from the back of the tortoise
that bears the world on its journey
through our benign, humorous galaxy.
Our fingers are covered
with a thin film of grease
from the socket the earth spins in.
We have seen a glimpse of the goalpost
of philosophy and religion
through the fog of oil coming
from the exhaust fan of a Pizza Hut.

Now all there is left to speak of
is nothing.

The nothing from which the chaos springs,
the nothing to which we should be eternally grateful,
because it is to nothing the chaos always returns.

Karl Gluck