The end of the world

I never saw the movie 2012. But maybe I took the trailers a little too seriously...

Noah's Neighbor

I seem to have developed a phobia
of rainstorms.
Kind of like the Benjamin Button’s disease 
of childish fears,
which somehow skipped me over
in the blur of primary colors
and rational tick- and murderer-phobias
that was gradeschool
and landed instead on the adult me,
burrowing into my meticulously tick-free head

There is no repellent for rainstorms.

Not even that nursery rhyme,

the one we learned to play on recorders in music class,

has any real magical influence

over such things as thunder clouds.

Adult me knows this

and it no longer helps to pretend

so I’m stuck in the real world

where rain is sometimes so real

it even trickles down into the basement

so real it doesn’t feel like pretending 

to imagine a pool rising around my ankles

as the wind tears the flesh from my house’s bones,

peels off the roof like an orange rind.

Would the cats survive,

riding, perhaps, on a buoyant mattress

to find a new home downriver

like fluffy waterlogged hobos?

Would my family be among the lucky ones

who got out

before our yard became a lakebed?

Would I live on

to rebuild my library

from scratch