Dark Tourism
Ground Zero came at one hundred degrees.
A fusing of life and death.
The graveyard came at twelve O’Clock
Not a single body to be seen.
From that infinite shadow I saw a light.
A woman. A goddess. A broken flame.
All that remained was a broken sky;
That holocaust of endless crimson.
The purged sky, forever more,
And hopeless onlookers were we.
The woman managed to find me.
Her words did not find her.
It was as if she had forgotten how to speak.
Just like the skeletons beneath us.
Specs and shards of shattered shield.
Just clusters of glass-like bone.
Beneath them, clusters of bone-like glass.
We did not know where to look.
We looked at each other, instead.
Hidden from one another no more.
I imagined what her smile was like,
Beneath the glass, beneath the frame.
All I could imagine was a frown.
A frown like the one I kept close.
The grass beneath me was like sand.
The sky above me, acid.
My mask and face became the same,
Just sand and smoke and nothing more.
She looked up into the sky.
Remembering what had once been.
All that is is what once was,
And I could not help but remember.
We’d gotten used to life after death.
The pleasure through all this pain.
Digging through shells of discarded men,
Picking the flesh from the bone.
The woman of my dreams was gone.
And I thought only of one question:
How did we let it get this way?
The endless night which follows day.
Copyright © Lewis Stuart Maskell Eyre | Year Posted 2023
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