what does it mean?
when the star-ships boil clouds up out of nothing,
they send down white fists of lightning
which knead the earth like the legs of a herd of elephants passing
inside the car, a dot on a surface street,
I can't do anything but watch as flying saucers press against the sky like faces by a window, thinking
fuck this
walk toward the highway,
picking gems from amid the broken glass,
combing necklaces from tangles of tubes, wire and hair
I bend and idly smooth the rubble on the road into a curving model driveway, looking up.
my fingers leave tire-trails in the dust.

in this dream, I take pictures with my phone, over and over
and each picture seems to fall out of the false night onto this tiny screen,
each more irrefutable than the last
where is he?
I ask
how will I find him, if this is the end of the world?

in every direction, the travelers cluster up in the sky
peeking down in packs between the tall buildings, which seem to cringe from them,
hysterical fingers clutching towards a fist,
listing like ships' masts, sinking,
homing in on a long sleep, coming to rest amid restless dreams
of raking the rubble into smoother and finer seams,
veins of lost things, faceless people running from a black cloud,
faces invisible from so high above,
from close up,
they fade into each other like the glass and concrete and bones.
make rubble, make gravel, become indistinguishable

and then, suddenly, the visitors withdraw -
secrets pressed back behind closed lips.
the black clouds pale to scars of white against a blue sky,
fade until only the pictures remain, but
the truth is written on our faces,
in my hands,
a cell phone, a length of a gold chain,
two blue stones of different colors,
a pearl,
a long shard of glass, stuck through with chicken wire,
a long cut across my palm, bleeding red over everything else.