Slowly. With a sigh of smoke and his piss on the fire.
An aspirin dissolving under the tongue.
With the plug melting into the socket's mouth,
with a mouthful of spark, a needle-tip
weeping saline solution.
Quietly. With a pedal and a foot,
and the brain's command to press.
Rapidly. With a crack, with a bag
full of blackened paper towels, with Drano
eating a hair clog, with a loose tooth and an apple.
With a Please, I love you. With an Okay.
With a ribbon ripping across your waste.

__

The muse for this poem was a song by the band DeVotchKa that shares the poem's title "How It Ends." The piece is an examination of different endings, depending on what definition I assigned to "it" in "How It Ends."