"Bright Star", Ng Wei Kai

I am awake and you are asleep.
The dark is full of ugly old fear. I am not sure if
it all belongs to me.
I think about whether a meteor will come and strike
The earth and clean it of us, rendering
unto ashes what is ashes.
I think I am afraid of this because I saw
Michael Bay’s Armageddon when I was four.

I watched it with my parents,
I think about them and all the other pairs
stretching out behind them.
And how for them marriage must have come
before intimacy, every wedding an invention of love,
wiping it clean and new and white.

I think about how close we are now
And how to remember it. How silly
And delicate
It is to remember love. Like pressing flowers
In the face of a meteor striking the earth
in the dark, wiping it
clean.