Brutal repetition drives the nail into the skull.
Waves unending lap the rusted metal from the hull.
Spirit bends as bodies break, and all their oaths defied.
Sailing as a corpse, sinful temptations at your side.

Breathing in the brine to set your bleeding lungs aflame.
Soaking in the salt, repent, for you're the one to blame.
Exodus of virtue, lest we take all that remains.
Helter-skelter shelters offer reprieve from the pain.

Offer her your hand, with luck a knuckle will suffice.
Slice! Did that feel nice? Let's get that finger on some ice!
Live amongst the rats and let your sanity unfold.
Dig your grave, and maybe on the way you'll strike fool's gold.

I found myself wanting to pray.
To lift up my words and let them float away.
Instead I put ink down on paper.
Hammering and shaping them to display,
This sense of wrongness and decay.
I’ve been reintroduced to the light,
Only to see that I’ve been made from clay.

I

The city is in decay -
Has been since it sprouted from the earth like a sapling,
Will be for as long as it still stands.
The only permanence is entropy.
Nature makes its bed
To unmake it.
We are eternal and mortal.
The jellyfish unbecomes itself into the polyp.

II

A millennium ago,
The ocean fell from the sky, drop by drop,
And dragons were a myth.
Dinosaurs came around
And dragons were a myth.
Humans came around
And dragons are still a myth.

If time is linear, time travel is impossible.
If it is cyclical, I have met my descendants.
If it does not exist, then I am still two and twelve and seventeen,
Young and old, a child of Schrodinger,
And eternal.

III

A cup of tea sits hot and cold.
It should one day be ice,
But not today.
Today it is full of salt.
Moses parts the Red Sea
And a motley crew of revolutionaries
Wait for tea leaves to steep in the harbor.
It is somehow simultaneous and distant all at once,
Another child of Schrodinger.
The sea rushes closed on an ocean floor
That is still made of sand.
Dragons are still a myth,
But the fish neither know nor care.

The tea goes down the drain,
And I replace the salt in the shaker with sugar,
As it should have been,
And for now, All is Well.
I walk into the adjacent room and
Immediately forget why I am there.
All is no longer Well.
The world forgot where it came from,
Mammals forgot the dinosaurs,
****** forgot he was Jewish,
And I forgot what I wanted here.
I want more tea,
But I don’t want to remember the salt.

IV

Time is short,
Born, spent, and dead in an instant,
But born and born and born again after that.
The city is in decay.
Teotihuacan was once New York.
Machu Picchu decays into the mountain again,
Venice and San Francisco will one day be underwater.
Kings held slaves when the monarchy thrived,
Nazis rose to power in their wake..
The people revolted against the crown
As their descendants march for peace, pay, and freedom.
There is no originality,
Time has proven this.
It unbecomes itself into the polyp as its feathers turn to ash
And pyramids are born in Egypt, the Americas,
In the courtyard at the Louvre.
Only time remembers when dragons were more than a myth,
And quarks became friends with each other.
One day, humans will be the myth,
And no city will stand, so no city will decay.
Tea will come in only salted flavors,
And dragons in none.
The only permanent is entropy.

Rivers of people
crowded the alleys of my mind.
Every thought of mine
had to go through them.
And they were relentless.
By the time it made through them,
it was not the same.
That beautiful new born thought
had turned into a old stranger.
I learned one thing
that I can never have a thought
or an action
that is truly my own.
And even when the building and the skies
of my mind decay,
the people in those alleys will live on.

The brown grass crunches beneath my feet.
There is death here. Nothing else.
A river of dust pours across the bank.
The air smells deeply of must.
I take a seat and breathe deeply.
The apparitions dance before my eyes.
A familiar voice calls out;
"You've been here before."
I nod in understanding.
This place was, is, my home.
I reach down to the dry soil, now shifting like sand in the wake of a great tsunami.
The dirt speaks. "When you were young,
you became the heir to our fortune.
Take what's yours."
I close my eyes.

My fingers, hands, arms, evaporate into cobwebs.
My toes, feet, legs, dissolve into thin air.
One moment, I was whole, and now,
You couldn't tell I was ever there.

How beautiful is this rose?
So beautiful in fact, that I plucked her
And brought her home.

Separated her from her roots
Because her beauty suited
My own selfish desire to have her.

It wasn't until her petals began withering
Her stem began to brown
Her once strong thorns, now soft to the touch

That I knew I had done a terrible thing
By bringing her inside
And shielding her from the rain.

How would she ever grow now?

consume
rot
the parasite
and the host
eat, eat
feast on decay
eat, eat, eat
i'll feed you, parasite
eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat
consume me

Iron which has been exposed to the rain, is likely to become rusty.
Weakening, brcoming fragile along the way, changing colours.
Because it couldn't resist the cruel, cold, pungent, sharp rain,
which has been brought by onimous, dark, clouds.
Those have come to claim the heavens, in malice, for themselves as they spread their offspring, letting it fall to the earth, fertilising it.
Once standing proud, the iron faced the weather carelessly, brave,
in such sense that it might have looked intimidating, impressive and
of course noble to some degree.
But for now it has aged, has become frail, feeble and slender.
Distorting its structure until suddenly it is not capable of holding
itself together, falling back down to the earth from which it came.
With enough care and treatment, such a fate would be avoidable,
But it is overlooked, chosen to be replaced instead of getting enough attention and so the metal decays in its oxidation, through time.
Until all of it has become a soft, crumbling powder.
Ruined by the simple raindrops, coming from a stormy day.

~ Umi