we held hands on the last night on earth.

our mouths filled with dust,

we kissed in the fields and under 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 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 echos of the past broke the hearts of the unborn

as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop.

the few insects skittered away in hopes

of a better past time.

I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked

If you would accompany me in a quick fall,

but you made 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 carved

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.