When the World Reversed Its Rotation,

gravity everted to a centrifuge. The sea rained
upon the sky and little girls dashed to the sun
like Superman. Cabs and cribs and carousels
vying on the verge of space and me clutching
nothing at all. The axis grinds, and I don't care.

The sun was maestro and earth a carnival
ride, and the world flipped upside down so grass
was sky. I walked amidst the trees now
clouds with a wombat by my side, just he
and I, and I and he, and neither of us watched

fire trace the contours of the faces in the violet
smoke pressed against the atmosphere by sunlight
expelled but never free. Lay beneath a willow tree
hanging up to praise the violent sky. Who wonders how
a tree trades a planet's pull for light, stretching for the sun?

Slowly breathed the thinning air in darkness draped
in light. The violet ring grew wider, and everyone
was dead. The wombat floated away like a knotted
balloon. I sank into the turf and gazed at ethereal
sunset bold beyond the bloated canopy.

The world stopped and the ring collapsed
into suspension, hovering over my head like pianos
on pulleys and angry hornets. The violet turned to orange
and I looked for my wombat in the dangling rubble,
but all I found were the remnants of a home.

The world resumed and the sky cracked and rained
as shards and twisted metal splinters. The weight
of trains and traffic lights trembled the poles. Oceans
rained in torrents and continents reformed in ribbons.
Rivulets swelled into ravenous ravines and interred

all the world beneath its fury. The earth is alive,
I can hear her song beneath the falling seas as I
ascend past thunder's womb and milk the clouds
for cosmic dust. I sail into rays of victorious sun, bask
and roast in brilliant blackness until I, too, have died.