I cannot stop thinking about a friend who is hurting.
I love her and I don’t want her to be hurting anymore.

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 echoes 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 pastime.

I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom
and asked if you would accompany me in a quick fall,
but you made me realize that my ticket wasn’t 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 was 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.