‘You Are Beautiful Like the End of the World’ & Collected Works

Jack Bordnick’s sculptural and photographic imagery is a reflection of my past and present forces
and the imagination of his life’s stories. They represent an evolutionary process of these ideas and how that all of life’s forces are interconnected, embraced and expressed thru creative art forms.
These works, represent he has accomplished with this art form. It is his quantum and metaphoric moment, the changing from one form to another.

You Are Beautiful Like the End of the World 

A truth: as I am unraveling you in a field of poppies, your eyes reflect the sunset. that is the end of it – and am telling you now, the beginning we will find along the way, but it will sound like this – “A truth: you are beautiful like the end of the world.” 

A truth: On the gold-planet, the suns make color flee from everything, and the world is like roe, and the surface is smooth like your face after a wash, but it does not shine, no, we have unwound all the reflections and all things that might breach the surface, and it is calm. 

A truth: the night you sit on the roof, you will tell me you do not want to know how it will end. and I know already I will never understand it, so I do not ask, because I have always known that the end will be beautiful, and we will all fall apart. 

A truth: past does not exist without memory. We come from distant tributaries, and we flow into the river of time. You are a stream, you flow with gravity. I am a lake, and all things pour from the river into me. The river is the same, I am just tall enough to see where the water leads. 

A truth: we need no ships to travel from world to world, we simply raise our arms and let the light carry us away, like the leaves off the tree in your yard. We are seeds that plant ourselves upon your planets, and eventually, something always takes root. 

A truth: Of all the worlds I will see, this one will be the most incredible. In the moments when I

watch your mountains fall, all I can think of is how high they have grown. One day, you describe to me “remorse”, which is a thing one can only have when they cannot see the riverbed. 

A truth: I do not want to unwind this world, it is just a product of the oils on my skin. On this world it waves behind me like long pennants, and your mesosphere tints me colors I’ll never see again, and I only wonder what it will look like when all of it is done. 

A truth: You are beautiful like the end of the world. See, I promised we would find it: it emerged when our tributaries merged, the day you ask me to tell you the truth. And so I do, and we begin as we do, as we did, as we will, in the poppy field and the car and the roof, with 

A truth: The end of the world is beautiful, and you have actually guessed it quite accurately, although you have asked me not to tell it to you. It ends in a bed of poppies, and their petals are hovering off of their stems, just as you hover away from yours.

Nightlily 

We’ll shed our names for offerings of 

skin and silk and creamsicle petals 

and hot cinders on our lips 

Someone will cuff my wrist 

and spin me into the reeds 

Tonight we are remembered by taste alone 

And when the sun rises, there’s 

a gift of grasshoppers 

rattling within our chests 

A life unlived made manifest 

by impossibly familiar breath 

still simmering softly on the tongue

Green Blood 

He’ll make his way back home eventually, But for now, he’s drunk on morning mist 

And crossed with pale light breaking through the leaves. Baby boy with a name on a registry. It’s 

All he needs, a shot of loam right to the bloodstream, And mycelium wrapped around his lungs, this, This is what it is. Someday he knows they’ll Hang him over with steel and oil, and he’ll vomit black, But this morning he’s riding it, 

on the draft towards the rising sun.

גלמי) The Golem) 

You didn’t cry when you were born, 

Tired, wrinkled hands your womb; you came into this world knowing How it felt to be handled. 

They used their spit to knead your soil 

And their first act of creation was to carve your destiny onto your face And they called you Truth. 

And you have to remember, these were men 

Of peace in a time where all they knew was war, so I’m sorry that 

I can’t find it in myself to hate you. 

The spit they made you from had bile in it already, that’s the Truth. The Truth is, nobody weaned you from the clay. 

You were carved out. Torn out. Pulled from your mother’s arms. 

All you knew was how it felt to be handled. 

So I’m sorry, that when people say your name today they spit on the ground. And call you a brute, and call your clay dull, well 

You, unlike them, have not forgotten the dust you came from. 

Your fathers birthed what they needed, and they knew that. 

They knew it when they put you at the ghetto gates, and let you see the world For the first time, and you saw that it had fire in its eyes. 

I’m sorry I can’t say they were wrong. 

I’m sorry they wanted you to change the world, when all you were was a reflection of it.

They were so afraid, you know. They didn’t see 

that Truth and Death are two sides of the same coin. 

Or they did, but they didn’t want to remember it. 

That’s not your fault. You’re your father’s son. 

And when the world came marching towards you with knives bared And you opened your arms to embrace them, it’s not your fault 

You thought that was how an embrace was supposed to feel. 

All you knew is how it felt to be handled. 

And that’s when they remembered Truth and Death were two sides of the same coin. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to tell them sooner, or maybe they wouldn’t have Put you up at the gates. 

Maybe they wouldn’t have spit in your soil. Maybe they wouldn’t have birthed you at all And they would’ve let the world burn down around them. Maybe they Didn’t deserve it, but neither did you. 

And so when your father climbed the wall to look you in the eyes, 

And he saw that he had forgotten to put them in, 

Did you think he was there to fix you? 

Did you hold him in your palm and draw him to your face 

Because how could a father do wrong for his son? 

Your mother never had. 

But Truth and Death are two sides of the same coin, and your destiny Was carved on your face from the beginning. 

So no, I couldn’t have stopped that. I’m sorry.

But as you crumbled under your own weight, and you remembered The dust you came from, 

In your last act, you lowered your father to the ground 

And set him on his feet. 

No, you didn’t deserve it. You came into the world knowing how it felt to be handled And all a reflection can ever hope to do is to be more than its origin To be framed in the dying light of the sun, as your hand comes apart below him And know that you did exactly what you were born to do. 

And they hated you for it. I’m sorry, I know you can never understand why But I want you to know; Death and Truth are two sides to the same coin And when you fell that day, you showed the world that all it takes Is for someone to hold you in their arms, 

Cradle you in the dust, 

And scratch out the word.

Man in the Foundation (for Cassandra) 

They found his body still fresh when they took the walls down, in a cage of rebar and stone. There was no ceremony, his burial where they found him unsanctimonious, Two lines of yellow tape across the grate and the doorway, 

And the storefront above him with cardboard over the windows, nothing to keep them from Sneaking down the basement steps with raiments donned 

Sweaters zipped and little red flashlights. 

He whispered to them from his throne in the irons, 

The city is inside you, it rides the highways of your varicose veins, 

and drinks of the wells of your postnasal drip, and inside you as her there are Five hundred thousand people breathing as one, and that makes you the city. His nervous system a tangle of copper wire sparking across his tongue, 

He said; 

The city doesn’t need you the way you need her, she ate the stars already long ago And you will dissolve in the Sodium Vapor of her stomach long before they do. He said; 

I am you, you just don’t see it yet, 

She has metastasized inside you since you were flesh upon flesh, and our only difference is when you die they will not bury you whole. 

And your skin will blister and crack as you age, and you will not wish for them to see you in a tomb anyhow. 

He said;

Give yourself to her if you wish, it makes no difference, 

She has taken the great poets and movie stars and scientists and you are but one more track to the train, 

His teeth were like polished mirrors, they saw their eyes in them. 

He said; 

She killed the earth with a million knives, and drank the oceans until they bled, but still You make her beautiful, you tattoo her arms and paint her face with light, And she remembers you. 

His breathing became labored then, a spilling of insulation, then 

He said, a final testament; 

Keep full your notebooks and draw me on the soles of your shoes, his 

Face upside-down twisted in a frozen laugh, and they fled up the stairs through her arteries And past her ribs and ‘cross the battered scaffold, 

As the man in the wall gazed in, arms-splayed, at she who took him whole.

Milo Duclayan is a student in Burlington, Vermont, but in his free time in the summers he is out LARPing in the woods, back in New York. There’s a kind of magic he has found there that he’s sure comes from another world, and it’s always his pleasure to use writing to bring some of that magic with him wherever he goes.