Have We Seen the Maps

// Michael Brian Price

God, how we choked, smoked, drank,
stumbled through our early days,
waxing, blusterous, what god could

kill us back then?

All our comical experiments in invincibility,
painful alchemy based on the sound principles

of wishful thinking and hope we’d transmogrify

our bruisable flesh into solid gold.

Mad scientists who cackled like Shelley’s hero
in the faces of angels, devils and each other,
in the faces of oncoming cars, dwindling whisky,

straight white lines, terror, loss, innocence, metaphors.

We, who swore allegiance to the trivial,
we, children of the atomic age,
we, who fucked like atoms bombarded,
we, who torpedoed all our unsinkable dreams.

How do we explain this charming sense of survival,
this suffocating nostalgia for … what?
Was it the ability to feel actually lost

in a too-goddamn-big world?

Was it comforting to imagine the atlas infinite
while we thumbtacked its skin to feel its breadth?
Have we seen the maps
and now can’t unsee the way all directions point?