When the end comes, the trumpet and flute will sound vexed, and even cosmopolites will lose their sangfroid and desperately invoke the gaseous spirit of God so as to have something to hide within. Millions of others will be pummeled to death with extraneous exclamation points or crushed under the weight of surrealistic pillows or strangled by their own voodoo. What few survivors there are will subscribe to the theory that military experiments involving remote mind control had backfired disastrously. The last words of an early twentieth-century composer will suddenly seem eerily prophetic. “Ah,” he said, “the cows. . .”



Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).