We held hands on the last night on earth. Our mouths filled with dust. We kissed in the fields and under the trees, screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves. It was empty on the edge of town, but we knew everyone floated along the bottom of the river. So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea, and the shattered seasons lay, and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease. In our cancer of passion you said, "Death is like a midnight runner." The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide. We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress. The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the ferris wheel suddenly slowed to a stop. The few insects skittered away in hopes of a better passtime. I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me in a quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two. I rode alone. You said, "The cinders are falling like snow." There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence. Of blue and grey. Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carried our names in the flesh of the city. The sun has stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and lines. Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward, and somewhere in the wilderness we found salvation scratched into the earth like a message.
-A.F.I.
