I sit in my school's dusty library
Like a picture taken on film
Full of grain and texture
Frozen beams of light
Through slanted venetian blinds
Capture and hold dust
Suspended like dew in a spider web

As the dust settled on the dim-lit floor,
So did the bodies of two.

Neither side saught out a victory,
Both were content in just knowing.

As the last splinter of sunlight faded,
Sweat joined with the dust on the floor.

Movements and minds were molded,
As pieces of passion collided Into place.

It was funny
How as I stepped into my city

With its blackened air beating my face
  each breath a war with chemicals

With dust, grime and garbage at every street
  and shops which no one ever enters

With all the noise and clamor of traffic
  and the neon lights which blind my eyes

It was funny really
How much I had missed my ugly city

Pale-faced beneath twilight’s awning, shadowed time skips
A beat measured in dust motes and attic silence;

Frameless ether holds its breath and portrait likenesses
Swivel eyes right, suspended between the minute and the hour;

In sequence, Whittington’s chiming sepia tones wring out
A tulip of port and one last cigar from drapery long hung;

As floral meanders unwind from a walnut casing
Inlayed with the gamine whimsies of our cherried youth.

There’ll be another day
When the night is through
A time to get away
A chance to start anew

There will be another year
When the year ends
A chance to reappear
A chance to make amends

And when the world is dust
Swallowed by the sun
Apathetic atoms will not fuss
Over the fact that we are gone

‘Cause one day the Universe will die
And Everything will become undone
But human experience imply
There’ll be another one

late
in lamplight's hiss
I sat and watched the attic dust
dance under spotlights cast
by moonbeam
          skylights
on a stage of memory
and forgetting

We shelter in caves
Beneath a man-made steel sky
Once reflective of our soul
Now corroded, its reflection a reminder of our great lie
That the Earth could be tamed
Exploited and submitted in the name
Of the human race
Now it is we who must abase ourselves
Deep underground
As above the megastorms tear apart the heavens
Grinding all the atmospheric rust
into vicious orange clouds
Which fall upon us: a forever-rain of dust
Blue oceans smothered
Forests choked
Fields unrecovered
Fires infinitely stoked
We dreamed once of going to Mars
But see instead it's Mars that's come to us
Descended people of a dead planet
We reap the fallen dust
We weep
       the falling dust

We are all dust.

Mere chaff blown on the hot winds of an African summer long ago,
when the world was fresh and humanity still sailed on clouds of air we soared above the baking earth and knew the freedom of the stars, not tethered to the ground in bonds of flesh and bone.

Dust we were and dust we will become again, in the end it's all the same.

Just dust!

Lure me in
With a melody of trust
But bury me deep
Under the dust
Hold out your heart
But tear mine apart
Leave me alone
After the love you have shown