Flash Fiction

The increasingly miniscule
size of the future
begins to cheer me
when I rediscover the red pleasure

of illumination,
remember the unraveled species
of monk on the island,
cowled and doubly so

in sunset’s contested
successions, the series
of weak emperors
all calling themselves
Jesus Christ

sending horses by train
on the one way
trip to the mountain –
but the details escape me.

The great day is coming,
the final atomic structure
prayed into existence,
why all the billions have suffered

and been forgotten
and yet presided
as a kind of bacterial
medium

in which experimental catastrophes
are cultured,
demonstrated,
diagrammed,

and ultimately tuned
to end the short story
(really a novella)
of the future
in exactly the wrong place.