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.
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