The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

A Sure Hand (Bastion)

The floor beneath you gives way, deconstructs, reconstructs, descends and ascends, coalesces, collapses; the west was never this wild. The wild was never this immaterial, this unstable. A handkerchief, a hammer, an assortment of ammunition and artillery: tools of the trade, and the trade is the last one in the world: survival. But if the world could not survive, if the bellhops and bartenders found themselves immortalized in fragile ash, then what hope does a kid have in the aftermath of the end times? What hope is there when the ground itself comes and goes as it pleases, when the dreams of strangers are sometimes as real as the nightmare of consciousness in this post to a post-world?

There is the hope of a sure hand, the hope a shotgun gives, if it’s well oiled and cared to, if there is ever hope in the technology of death. The world has fallen through and apart and across itself, and everything is myth now, artifact, fetish. And the kid wakes up. Or keeps trying to, wishing it was something he could wake up from.