Maybe the darkest things are the truest things,
Death, the redoubtable lover of all, the atom bomb
Burns beneath cherry blossoms of closed eyelids,
A magnolia grove of forever fasting lips of the dead,
Pompeii and Hiroshima, twin lovers of rupture,
Graves of the wind now, keepers of nothing and all.

The earthquake wove ripples of terror in the minds of my Pompeii...
Trembling I looked towards the great Vesuvius of my emotions still offering me a hint of the bad days to come...

Yet I chose to belittle... And went on bottling my concern within the four walls of the city of my mind...

So one fine day... When I saw a layman hitting stones to see a spark...

The Vesuvius of my emotions erupted... Without a warn
And engulfed my Pompeii in a great ocean of long suppressed lava leaving only in some places a hint of some hardened souls...

...

Thus... The regret of catching the hint of Vesuvius about the unexpected exodus of my emotions... Only remained a prisoner of the past!

We were none the wiser, I shopped the stalls,
for bread, for father was treating us to a
                                                                ­­          luxury.

He'd been offered overtime, and we didn't have it
      very often. But he knew we were down, and hungry.

Feeling the earth move, the gods were either hungry,
                                       like our empty stomachs.
Or they were punishing us for not giving enough praise
                                             for there gestures of kindness..

We heard the rumbling of Vesuvius, like an empty belly
                                                       rumbling for worth.

Then we heard the screams, as the mountain spat its
anger towards us, we had no where to run.

To hide from the mountains anger was futile.
             We huddled together,

praying to our gods


for salvation..

But our plea's  were unheard,
   had we put our faith in the wrong god!!!


Hearing the dark snow fall like pebbles and then the
                      ash of concealment.

Suffocating in our prays, we huddled tighter than
             life's last breath... and then we
            were like statues
frozen in a moment of futility...

A once flourishing moment, buried in times
                   concealment.

We were found, shells of our former selves,
                  huddled in eternity a love.

Fossilised in a last moment,
           telling the future we died together,

a moment of love shown through the ages...

The light from the end of eternity
Comes in through the window glass
Sits on the sill with the red Anthurium
In the stenciled orange Waterford vase
Centuries.down.and.Decades.done.
From the grassy light of the Lyceum.

If the sun were to choose where to die,
It would falter over Pompeii,
And lie like a broken godhead
Or lava poured into the pottery cups of
The open-skied houses.

I never asked
for my hands to be caked in ash,
fists full of powdered, smothered memories
weigh me down like cages;
if you were to see my body,
cut apart, missing, coated
and preserved as a martyr,
like a body in Pompeii
trying to fight back the smoke.

Rumblings shaking the earth
Names cried out, long lost
Blame the gods, or us
Who forgot to pray?

Buildings collapsing
“Ubi est mater?”,
Children cry
Who forgot to pray?

Ash everywhere
Miles and miles of dust
This is it,
Goodbye Pompeii.