Dance with me,
One last time as the daylight dims
The smoldering heaps
Substitute for candle-lit walkways
A final ritual in romance as we revolve
‘Round we twirl to the music of crackling embers.

The sun above is being choked by the smoke of the dead
The earth itself is blacker than endless nightfall
Nothing grows, as even the dead oaks rot
Their desperate limbs outstretched, begging for salvation,
But the orange glow catches your creamy face,
You haunt me, in a world where beauty is dead.

In a sea of flame,
Surrounded by the nameless remains
We waltz and twist,
Contort into one,
Asking the skyward palisades
“What have we done?”

Obsidian rain reigns down
Cutting your perfect porcelain
As the red flows like waterfall fountains
We find ourselves on the verge of the abyss
A single tear mixing with your wine,
Could not stop how sweet you are,
We found an epilogue,
Befitting our dreams,

Dance with me,
One last time,
‘Round we twirl to the sound of shards
Even now, bared to the world,
Reach out your hand,
And now it’s yours.
My heart.

My god,
What have we done?

As the embers rise from magmatic tides
The life we lived, loved in lusted lips
As we slid our pride between her fertile hips
We birthed the ******* of our own demise,
Now we can’t see beyond the tears from
It’s acidic eyes!

What have we done?
What have we done?

Oh father on high
Do you even hear us whimper?
The days grow short as the fires grow higher
Burning to find salvation,
Congregate the ground and let me dance within the sea of flames
Burden us no longer with misery,
Ascend us on high leave us not behind!

O father, what have we done?
What have we done?

Dark as black could ever be
Caught in a lungful plead to bury me
A thought dithers, as the light withers
Flesh flayed to the roasting pits
As the echoes linger,

She reaches from her core
To engorge on all the parasitic hosts
That rot her, treated her essence like a *****
We spoke of natural beauty,
As we ripped the limbs of her trees.
We spoke of natural beauty,
Piling high our heaps of **** —
Suffocating her shores.

The sky went black,
His voice struck,
Percussion in unison,
Opened wide the gates,
As unclean ones came,
Carry off the weak,
Carrion feasts from open graves,
This forsaken place,
God has left this waste
Weld shut the gates!

O father,
What have we done?
What have we done?
Oblivion!

The ember extinguishes,
Imposing darkness.
The pyre's carcinogen
ushers him to move on.

The fragrance teleports him:
Childhood bonfires,
Burning cities,
The end of civilization.

Burn it all down!
So much is lost.
From the fires of rebellion,
regression into tribes.

Among the ashes,
he finds a charred Bible
and quickly hides it.
Demoniacal wailing nearby.

He hurries to his bivouac,
hidden in a cliffside crevasse.
He devours the legible words,
diligently memorizing fragments.

A far off explosion reverberates;
pinned up book pages quake.
He mumbles “***** and Gomorrah
… to ashes … the ungodly.”

Feebly he undresses:
jacket with phoenix insignia,
tattered baseball cap,
and military boots.

His eyes, deeply sunken,
craving to espy hope.
His quivering emaciated frame
lowers unto a cot.

Laying his hoary head to pillow,
Phrases, memories, and regrets
accompany him to the celestial gates;
the ember extinguishes.

Mosaics scrawled in oak,
Charters to a new dimension,
Candles bring forth grey smoke,
Filling a stygian room with tension.

A hallowed oversoul awaits a sacrament,
Crimson stanzas chanted, a return anticipated,
The King still needs a benighted advocate,
Atonement was made, with a blade of onyx, serrated.

Throughout the hall, a sensation,
First came the scent of velvet nectar,
Then, the impact of consternation,
And all among the walls, dark and unearthly spectres.

An observance had concluded,
As the veil was torn by madness,
And the microcasm, polluted,
A world overthrown, by the abyss.

I found the two-headed baby deer dying
on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak,
not five kilometres from my cottage,
Its lungs still pumped,
Its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin,
translucent skin,
that decayed before my eyes,
until there was no skin,
and all the organs lay warm and still,
in a heap upon the earth,
like waste.

A god evaporated.

It is human nature to disbelieve
that one may be witness to epochal events,
so I did not believe that I,
of all people,
should be witness to the death of time.

Epochal: the concept itself is dead.

How lucky we were
to know time at its cleanest,
and most linear!

We know now that such constant linearity
was the consequence of a living entity,
It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk,
and we basked in it
as if it was the natural state of the world.

No more.

Time no longer heals,
Things do not pass,
Or pass only to return.

At first we believed this would be manageable,
Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love,
Everything shall be magnified!
Welcome to an age of great emotions,
a new Romanticism!

Yet we overestimated how much we help,
failed to accept how much we hurt.

And we did not realize the nature of evil,
which accumulates in a way love does not,
To re-experience our love is to know it,
again and again,
at the same intensity,
but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us,
deafening us to everything else.

I will never forget the creature's eyes,
full of hatred or hubris,
yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.

How does one save a dying god?

It was not my fault!

I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation
expressed in an undiscovered mathematics,
I had to fail,
yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.

I relive it constantly,
Every time its eyes are louder.

But it is the hour for my afternoon walk,
so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.

I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city,
and sit on the iron bench,
from where the view is magnificent,
Above me,
the clouds will form,
a tangle of pain and human corpses,
and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall,
Then the screaming will begin,
the final storm will rage,
Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin
of dissipating reality,
raining blood until we are left
warm and still upon the earth.

Bodies jostle toward the heatsource,
Foot stomp, elbowed in the rib,
Muttering voices hoarse, exhale mists
That swirl like deadmen's ashes in the wind.
Pale lumina saturates the cinder skies,
Under which the aged remember
The suns of former lives,
Their memories the glowing solitary embers
Of a world we've left behind.
Ahead, a mother veils her babe with rags
From a passer-by's ravenous gaze.
A man automatously drags
A rattle-bag of assorted human remains,
Leaving trails in the dirt,
Leaving trails in the dirt.
We have splintered apart the frame
Of this landscape of hellpain,
Against smokestack sequoias and asphalt seas,
We stumble toward the crematoria.
My God, the coldness hurts!
As upon the canvas of this frozen Earth
We enact the terminus of human innovation,
The burning of every breath,
The engineered suicide of civilization.
Out, out, brief candle,
said Macbeth.
Into the cull chamber I step,
Hoping there at least I will find warmth,
In death.