sirens

people don't remember anything. sirens every night. they're sending a new satellite to jupiter. it will sail around a planet a hundred times the size of planet earth. it will see its red storms, storms the size of the earth. there is a sea of darkness that goes on forever between us and it.

i was walking the street last week and a young fellow smoking a joint who slept in an rooming house down on yonge street and was going crazy because there are no walls, just dividers and a tyrannical asian woman who scratched up his arm looking for crack in his gymbag, he said he thought something big was going to happen soon. i said something big is always happening. he said yeah but like the end of the world. i said it is always the end of the world for someone somewhere.

then we speculated that everything was run on electricity. if you cut off the electricity you could plunge the world into chaos. all some terrorist would have to do is stop the electricity. all the computers would go down. all the lights in all the cities. all the phones. bank records would be gone. the sirens would go silent. we agreed we would get out of the city as fast as we could. we would catch fish and hunt and learn to do things.

generators might run some things, but everything would be back in darkness. then there would be fires to keep out the darkness. then the fires would spread. nasa would lose contact with its satellites, and it would drift, sending back messages now and again, asking, are you listening? are you listening?