It’s eight o’clock in the morning
& already the sun is beating down
on my head like a hammer—
across the street, my neighbor 
emerges from his front door
& makes a beeline for my driveway,
cutting me off before I can get away 
“Hey,” he yells, “have you noticed the whole 
neighborhood is going down the toilet?’

He pauses as if waiting for a giant flushing noise,
then wheels around & charges back
to his house, slamming the door behind him,
claiming he could see the atoms in my hand
as I waved him off my lawn.

He once told me he didn’t believe
in global warming or evolution
despite the rising sea levels,
dinosaur bones, & carbon dating,
making me wonder if Darwin was wrong
about some branches of the human tree.

I imagine my neighbor lying awake each night,
tiny cathedrals crawling behind his eyes
like a sarcophagus of sunsets
as he struggles to rise from the soup of his own thoughts,
like the first creatures leaving the sea for land.