Tyler Zeoli

Funeral Pyre

If 10 minutes from now

The Voice of God

came over the speakers

and said

“Good Morning All,

I’ve just been informed

a giant meteor

is hurling towards Earth,

And we all have a month left.

National Honor Society meets today

right after school in the forum.”

Then I say

I would stay in my seat

And wait.

Just until the panic

settles.

And once it did,

I would walk out to the back lot,

And dump out my bag,

onto the blacktop

Encouraging others to join suit

Dropping it down

On the very spot

We were sent

To practice our

clearly improbably organized escape

From a hypothetically improbable inferno

That we no longer need to run from

But for which we now

provide the kindling

Together creating the eighth wonder

Of our ending world.

A momento to our wasted time

Time spent ignoring our lives

Taking a nosedive so far into Their books

That We forgot what roses smelled like

Time spent memorizing the fronts, backs,

ups and downs of flashcards

for a test that doesn't exist

Past the moment of

Time spent staring at equations for so long

We forgot that math

doesn’t have fucking letters.

Time spent craving after grades like a dope fiend

doing whatever it takes for the high

scores

that

don’t

matter

Time spent on Numbers that vanish

Like a match lit

To spark a funeral pyre

Every bit of oxygen spent

To feed a flame

To free a friend

And then gone in a flash

The Time that we spend

memorizing the dates

of the deeds

of long dead kings

When we should’ve

been writing

our own history.

Because even though

There wouldn’t be

a story to tell,

We would’ve been more

than a monolith

of wasted time

Waiting to burn.