Poetry: Entropy by Avril Bries

Entropy
by Avril Bries

In the line ahead of us the poor little Filipino
Boy spills his fries on the bug-specked ground, causing an earthquake
Of potatoes on tile—we stop talking absurdity then, instead watch
Two types of his wreckage: on the floor and on his face,
Downturned lips telling tales of how he was betrayed by gravity.


I think: Kid, that’s not going to be the last time
You lose something. Today it’s fries, tomorrow you’ll grieve over the buttercups
That don’t exist in this city; the beggars
With feral eyes; the swerveback of cars crashing; the filament tracery
Of lines in the sheets abandoned by the body that lay in them; the bodies which lie
In the ground; the pitbottom of corporate machinery running your life;
the haunted avenues with rows of acacias and sloe-eyed students
Who won’t give you a fuck, won’t give a fuck about you; and you

—you’ll mourn
Yourself the most, for being someone who needs to mourn at all.

What’s a carton of fries in the grand scheme of things?
Take it into context, though: those few mouthfuls would have meant
The world to some starveling body who would have killed you for them—
But you? You’re in the Philippines but you have only first-world problems.

So forget it, forget the lost chance to masticate or the less than fifty pesos gone,
I want to tell you: it’s 2015 and I can’t imagine bombs
Blowing us up; we are ourselves bombs
Going off in supernovas and whimpers. We’re a series of mouths in revolution,
Of balloons careening towards a storm. We want so hard
That in the end we always seem to be betrayed by something—maybe

It’s the irony of death by rat piss, maybe it’s the fire tearing up suburbia,
Maybe it’s your father’s jawbreaking touch, maybe it’s just
Gravity, all over again. But the constant is not change but loss,
Screw what Heraclitus said—he’s dead now, been dead for a while; nothing new on that front,
Nothing changed. But let me show you a physics book and meander
Through the incomprehensible tangle to that recurring triangle—

It’s called entropy, my dear. To hell with the jargon, all you need to know
Is that it means in the end
Everything
Falls
Apart.

Then mommy leads you away, and the underpaid janitress
Comes to sweep the pile of your grief from the floor (they cost
More than she makes in an hour, I'd bet).
No, it won't be the last time kid, but someday
It won't be that easy to erase, won't be only distant trails
Of salt scattered on the surface, like tears for people to walk on.