oh! my injured brother.
my lost tormentor.
you beast
of the severed hand.

travail through these nights of fire,
sifting through the bones
and ruins.

i lay down into the sprawling fields,
a series of small
explosions go off in my brain;

i sink into the inky darkness
as words escape me,
pulled under by the distancing reports.

my throat goes dry and full of copper.

my nose choked acridity.

i look up toward the dead and dying,
a vicissitude reflecting; refracting.

the vicissitude
a monolith of my new becoming
clicks on,

starts to play and replay.
again and again

and again.

now you
my injured brother;
sickly and scarred,
damaged and harmed
hang there on the brink of surrender.

slowly bringing me to recognize
that I am becoming;

that i have become now
a beast
with a
severed
hand.

we will not be;

we can not be praised for
the manner in which we suffer.

we've crawled over
these sprawling cliffs of ash;

built up palaces of tangled
bones and branches;

but even now, even these
venerated places have been stripped
of their gold and light.

not all suicides are lonely endeavors;

the mud and water macerates the walls
the ceilings are coming down
the floors

cave in.

and what of our future?
it was there
sparkling on the horizons
until it wasn’t.

just a fading twinkling for a decade or two
and then nothing, a saturnine glare;

an unknown and unwanted solution;

our weakened hearts palpitating
erratic and wild.

the sun’s full of bleach
raining down merciless light
through the wheezing atmosphere;

what are we now?
the unsaved,
almost forsaken;

forgotten in the reaching tendrils
suffocating in the newfound
unmitigated eclipse.