For it Not to Be

I hear tell it's been written
in many good books
exactly what our demise
will look like, what its
salient facets will be.
I see for myself that most
of those factors are
arranging themselves in
an awe-inspiring hurry,
placing themselves just so,
in the skies, in our futures,
so that, at any moment,
some gasket somewhere,
some airtight element
surrounding one of our
pipelines, our troughs,
our conveyor belts of
excess is going to blow.
The flames of every
terrible war which ever
could have been will be fanned,
the seas will rise,
the mountains will melt,
and we'll finally hate
each other with the most
virulent hate ever conceived.
I've often thought that
if you would rather
a particular set of
circumstances not
come to be, the best way
to avoid it is to imagine
it's true. Nothing in
the history of the world
has ever been the way
any of us imagined; thus,
to imagine all the ways
the world can end is
to imagine all the ways
it could never possibly end,
not really, not in actual fact.
So, join me, won't you:
let's imagine for a moment
that we all really want to wring
each other's necks,
that we'd just as soon
there were no more
problematic oceans or
maladjusted forests to
worry us day in and day out.
This way, you see,
maybe the truth really
will be better than we
could ever have dreamed.

(2007)