There is nothing better
In the eyes of men,
Then watching fire consume the world,
The way it’s always been.
Our race to the funeral pyre
Runs along rivers of our dead.

Ours is a head first rush.
The bones rattle in stiff protest
As we crash through wall upon wall.
Never tiring, our ****** feet trample
Over the ivory pillars, pulling it down,
On top of us, laughing.

This is what I think
When I watch that flame catch that branch
And spread across the world like frost does on a window.
I can’t help but smile, and have the light bounce off my teeth.
God help us all.
It’s beautiful.

I think we go through this life screaming and hurtling,
like a man in a chute, falling.  
As he dives down this chute,
faster and faster, his hands continually shoot out.
As if to grab something.
Anything.
But it’s all so smooth, no breaks
no ledges, not foot holds or failsafe’s.
Down and down he goes.
So desperate he becomes,
when he sees the circle of light above him start to shrink and disappear.
Watch him screeching, clawing, gnashing, and dying,
all to return again to the light he no longer remembers.
And while others above him appear bathed in light,
he cannot see that they fall just the same;
all hands outstretched in apocalyptic pleading.
Never once knowing escape was be found at the bottom,
not the top.

Late at night,
My blue smoke floated
Away; running from solid things
Like jars, that would hold me.
The red pulsing sky
Throbbed meaningless tremors
Before being swallowed by the midnight blue.
The chevron path
Of my blue smoke
Is haunted by antique kings.

Someday they’ll look back here
and tell each other,
that the end started with us.
We are the plateau kids, the ones who lost it;
We who watched the new millennium
sink into place as our monument to apathy.
The derivative of a derivative is our only construct left standing now.
The de-evolution of a soul, spiraling out,
becoming thinner and thinner the farther it reaches,
leaving us hollow scarecrows
still guarding the dead field.

We are a generation of potentiality,
lost in twisting teeth.  Clockwork gears
churns us out, hollow men pushing hollow men
through and out doors, into a world of excessive emptiness.
Fertile though the mind may be, it’s lost on us.
We are the spectators of progress, the ones who watch and
laugh and drink and **** and snort and smoke
and post and pop and dance and steal and die.

Beauty stopped with us,
and all was lost.

The tobacco end is lit under sickly, divine light.
Its artificial glow lays heavy on the snowy spectators.
I am the preacher of this sermon today, this cigarette my casualty, my charge:

The cigarette’s life began like most, its burning birth
Lightened the darkness which surrounds us.
And with the ragged breaths that are taken, the flare of its
Seemingly undying ember burns strong.
Impossible it must seem to the cigarette, that this flicker of bright life
May itself be extinguished, that this furnace of vitality
Shall ever be dampened.

But so it is, in flesh as it is with the ****
That through one’s exertions your smoky essence be filtered
Through the lung of life. Expelled, exhaled, disdainfully into the world.
I am the mother of this life, I gave it breath, I gave it fire.
And yet, it will be I who stamps its ember.

Its cemetery is grey and ashy.
Generations of the used stand squashed.
They themselves are their own headstones;
The cracked bodies the only sign of their resting place,
Like those unknown soldiers and their wooden crosses.

I lay it down to rest, in its sandy grave,
I say its last rites, I cross, amen.
It falls upon deaf ears, as it should.

And so I stand over it, life’s true eulogy
Echoing off empty walls.