Quickly, Slowly. Dying.

It thumps. It taps. It bangs.

Hello, hello old visitor,

New friend.

Welcome to the madness

Staining the sky this unholy red.

Welcome to the blood puddles

Flooding pathways with black shadows.

.

Things have changed, shifted, metamorphosed

Into this pastiche of bleak suffering

And greyed thoughts,

Mumbling internal monologues.

The landscape is new.

Have you missed it? Wondered where the

Golden glow of history vanished off to?

.

It’s gone.

Men with black ties swallowed it whole,

Women with pencil skirts chomped on the corpse,

And the people parading down cracked asphalt

Scavenged the fleshy bits flung

From the scene of the crime.

They’re all dead. All gone. It ended years ago.

.

No, no. They haven’t gone extinct.

They’ve simply cracked their spines open,

Slurped the sweet cerebrospinal fluid,

And turned themselves into nightmares.

Hollow minds, hallowed ground.

A safe space from the grotesque imagery.

If no thought sticks, no terror remains.

.

They are empty.

.

The spirits wander to the rattling beat

Of progress marching backward,

The future pounding the drying soil

In futile attempts to dig in,

To stay.

It taps. It bangs. It thumps.

A glass eye catching the light of a disco.

.

Look here, at the man twitching in the gutter,

Spewing vitriolic memories

That sound like a summer thunderstorm.

Do you remember them?

Those moments that caught the early rays

Of sunshine and hummed in our veins?

It killed them. It changed them. It broke them.

.

Now they wander looking for scraps of sunlight,

Crumbs of pink sunsets and orange sunrises.

Look what they find.

Blood.

On their hands, smeared against their teeth,

Smudged across their lips like some vogue gloss

Gone matte with age.

.

They’re hungry for it,

For the warmth that suddenly vanished.

Quickly they search through the rubble

Tearing apart both beams and hands.

Futile. Impossible. Horrific.

They’re dying, crumbling under the emptiness

They thought would save them.

.

It happened slowly.

A tickle that stopped producing a smile.

The smiles aching in their jaws.

But they pushed on, eager to expose their teeth

To sunlight again,

Sunlight that would never return.

Not to their blood, not to their minds.

.

It’s over.

Death, you came too late.

Look what has happened.

They’re husks, hobbling but void of hope.

What does an end matter to those

With no hopes of a beginning?

Eternity is useless to the dreamless.

.

S ilver Serpent Books.

.