(Its Not) The End of the World
(It’s Not) The End of the World
Pavement boiling in the city’s breath,
commuters drowning in digital haze,
fingers scrolling, eyes numbed to death,
reality bent by the clickbait craze.
Crimson bleeds through glass towers, stains
every window a sick tainted hue,
but nobody looks up—habit maintains
its throne, denial the only shield we knew.
Engines choke in gridlock confession,
horns blare, tempers fraying at the seam,
each driver cusses the hour’s progression,
too numb to feel the apocalypse streaming.
Shopfronts flicker with synthetic peace,
mannequins posed behind panes gone red,
sirens coil through traffic’s disease
and no one, nowhere, admits what’s ahead.
Across the avenue a woman films herself
for metrics, for sponsors, for the next fix,
blind to the wound splitting the sky’s shelf,
consumed by the applause she’ll never mix
with the dread pooling in everyone’s chest.
A man in a suit tweaks his tie, ignores
the rust coating his skin like a curse,
he’s got meetings to fake, debts to outrun,
no bandwidth for the terror, no time to feel worse.
Children drift home under clouds that boil,
faces washed in the cartoon glow of screens,
while their parents drone about homework andoil,
pretending the horizon isn’t what it seems.
Every feed screams normal, deflection dressed
as care—meteorologists call it a trick,
“optical distortion,” nothing suppressed,
just another grey morning, nothing to fix.
The news loops, anchors smiling through code,
calling the rupture a trick of the lens,
politicians tweet concern, then unload
their portfolios, drunk on pretend.
Nobody panics, the headlines declare,
stay calm, carry on, tend your yard,
while the sky goes redder, the streets turn spare,
and the tension buries itself in guard.
Neighbors fire up the grill, laugh too loud,
pass around beers like communion with dusk,
no one asks why the birds have gone shroud,
why every breath tastes of iron and rust.
The air sits thick, metallic, wrong,
but denial’s a drug the whole city breathes,
grief swallowed with the daily prolong,
prayers unspoken, hooked to the eaves.
Somewhere in a stairwell, bodies collide,
hunger sharpened by a nameless dread,
old men smoke on stoops, their eyes gutted wide,
recounting histories long since dead.
A child looks up: “Is the sky broken, Ma?”
but gets nothing—just parents elsewhere,
preoccupied, performing calm like a bra,
smiles rehearsed, answers too spare.
From the rooftops the city gleams
behind its makeshift mask,
a thousand windows catching the red,
and not one soul will dare ask
why the silence underneath the laugh
feels like something coming apart.
There’s comfort in missing the cracks,
in blaming the clouds for the stain,
in treating a burning sky as facts
just slightly off, a different kind of rain.
A tremor lives in every handshake,
a secret buried in every joke,
as if we all perform, play our part,
the sky won’t fall, the spell won’t broke,
the world won’t choke on its own facade.
We cling to routine, the rinse and repeat,
all to hold off the unmaking,
yet everyone feels it—the hush, the weight,
the ground shifting under our waking.
“It’s not the end,” the screens proclaim,
“just light and color, no harm, no blame,”
but hearts rewrite what mouths recite,
harder now, unable to fight.
Somewhere a first mistake slips through—
a truth in the air, a dread overdue,
the world keeps spinning, but so does the screw,
the shame, the knowing we can’t undo.
We keep smiling, keep scrolling, keep buying
the lie that crimson overhead is just odd,
but shadows lengthen, silence multiplies,
comfort fits no one anymore, not god.
We live and die by habit, by faith in the fake,
while the world tilts quiet, ready to shift,
so let them keep chanting “It’s not too late!”—
each denial a prayer we can’t lift.
We carry on, we pretend, we refuse to crack,
but something’s begun and everything aches.
It’s not the end of the world—not if you ask—
but it’s the first mistake, and we’ve all unmade.