New Draft

The Death of the Future Lies in Eggs

I have been eating a heart-
shaped lopsided chocolate
cake every night
for the past three.
It has deflated comfortably,
its consumption as
predictable as decay.
I wonder if instead of eating
it I have given it over to
a colony of those Amazonian
ants capable of carrying
away livestock, crops,
unattended infants.
No,
there are no ants.
There is only my mouth
and fork, which I can now
only think of as a weapon.

Last night,
I pulled the cake box
out of the fridge.
On its way, it pushed out
the carton of eggs.
If they could have
they would have tumbled
to the ground. Maybe
they spun slowly
in their Styrofoam homes
while events beyond comprehension
but within sensing
took place.

I watched them land,
wishing about salvage,
saw the yolk floating
on top of a clear flood.
Part of me
wanted to see what the egg
would harden to
when out of its shell,
but I and the eggs
wouldn’t have been able to come back from that.
So I speculated they’d
look like amber with all
the bronze history sucked out—
dull like the way quartz seems empty.

Spent the next few
minutes on my knees,
Rubbing a 10¢ rag
of a washcloth
against the carpet until
the clear and the yolk
just sort of gave up
and disappeared in between
the surface of the
carpet and the bottom of the air,
asking me:
if you were green and shattered,
wouldn’t
you be disappointed?