All in all, my apocalypse theory needs more disaster.   Locusts and birds plummeting from the sky.   A swimming pool full of beautiful, doomed, starlets.     We arrange chairs in a circle.   Make up chants about god, wave pinwheels and tiny flags and misread the stars.   I wear a mask, but it's a mask over another mask.   An outline of a face over the place of a face it used to be.   My apocalypse theory lacks teeth, but what it lacks in bite, it makes up for beautiful insects, smashed and legs akimbo on the mounting board.   Call it pheromones.   Call it ferocious.     I'll be half gone before you even know I'm here.

We go off grid, off our guard.   Specialize in intersection, vivisection. My apocalypse reflects like a sonofabitch, but it's the horizon you need to watch out for, lined with tickertape parades and abandoned Chevrolets,   We take only what we need:   The purest white stationary dotted with roses.   A toothbrush.   A hand grenade, I can hide so many things in my mouth by now, it's ridiculous: batteries, cyanide capsules, packets of splenda. We take only what we need but then we need everything.   Razor blades, dead matches, tiny exquisite miniature bears.   My apocalypse theory watches as I cauterize a wound on my thigh with molten sugar.   A bruise on my arm from some barnyard, backyard, back of the bar violence.   Everywhere we go, I keep collecting maps. Keep them quartered and small and damp with spit.

My apocalypse theory likes it when the hillsides are all on fire.   When I place my hand over his eyes while driving.   The flicker, flicker, of passing headlights.   In the abandoned paper factory, all of the chairs were chained to the floor and I had the strangest cancer, like hundreds of pigeons stopping up my lungs.     I needed a gas mask.   I needed a drink. The inside of my mouth was lined with silver nacre and slippery.   Really, I was bleeding all over the place.   Going down and down into the furnace until my hands were blistered and peeling.   It was the worst sort of trespassing, but the best sort of torture porn.   I used a rolled up newspaper as a lantern and kept coughing into my sleeve.   My apocalypse theory likes my hair when it smells like smoke. My apocalypse theory likes it when I don't say stop. .