After the World Dies

1

I remember the day that cloud dived down upon us. We hid for hours in that tunnel between Covent Garden and Leicester Square. The ringing in my ears made me cry a little bit, but you kissed me and I smiled. I remember your face as you heard the roof cave in slightly; I held you close and told you that we were in the deepest station in the Underground, so we were safe from the blast. I felt the insanity calm within your chest and you fell asleep in my arms.

We starved for days underground and some went mad. That family we had seen in the theatre before the panic were sprawled like crimson shadows across the platform after a week. I can still hear the little one crying for hours on end until her voice turned into a scraping wheeze. You and I, we were strong and we fought through the crushing death until we got to the surface.
I remember that last rock I pulled out of our tomb. I can remember the burst of sunlight, like a column of honey that blinded me for a minute or two. I remember the madness of laughter we felt. The surface, it was like a dream. The broken buildings formed mountains against the stained sky. The human world had been erased.
 
2

Dust.
Dust and rubble -
a scattered life of things
of no value;
A toxic wind blows in off
the trembling horizon,
where the sun died
all those years ago.
It collapsed into a faint memory -
half-extinguished,
like everything now.

We look out into the waste
with a forever stare
that blurs and warps
into a confusions of realities;
Water is transcending,
escaping what we have done
and swelling the air
into a heaviness that hangs
on the skin - it hangs on the mind.
Cities and people flashed,
imploded in the madness of my stare
and the earth went mute -
dried of normality.

3

Toxic swept like a romance across the land; many had died, but most were considered artificial. The blast had filtered out all that was unnatural and man-made. It drowned our efforts to improve the Earth. Thousands of gods were scorched into an infinite number of pieces. Everyone we once knew were but minuscule motes of dust dancing upon the tides of the wind. They hung in the air around us as the reminder of everything that had happened. Some were sheltered from the initial blast, but rotted and tore themselves apart with their radiation poisoning.

Within hours of escaping the tunnel we found a place to settle for a few nights. You scavenged around a supermarket for a stock of food, whilst I cleared the body parts from our new home - I wanted them out of sight. I picked up a finger; it was missing its owner. I held it up to the fragile sun and admired the scattering of light that the diamond ring produced. A kaleidoscope of dreams. A promise from another life. I tried to slip the ring off, but it wouldn’t budge. I had to cut off the flesh from underneath it with a piece of shrapnel I found near what used to be a car. I slipped it into my pocket with a smile, threw the finger at a crow and washed it later in a puddle.

I had started to panic after you had been gone for a while and, like a fool, reached for my mobile phone to realise that technology is dead. When you did eventually return, I kissed you, told you I loved you and gave you a diamond ring. We must have hugged for thousand years because the air filled with the sound of gunfire. Perhaps violence never dies.
I grabbed your hand and we hid in our rubble cave. We pressed against the floor until our teeth scraped the concrete. The gunshots grew louder like the amplified sound of breaking bones with the consistency of pattering rain. I looked at you and you held my hand. Such beautiful eyes you have; at that moment they looked like music, a swelling crescendo of passion. I told you that we had survived the end of all that we knew - the apocalypse. I told you that are that nothing could kill us: no bomb, no starvation, and definitely no gun. I told you that we were the strongest people I knew. I told you we were invincible.


 
4

Confusion of sounds,
a flicker of feet
the crackling fire
did melt the street
into a current of dreams
where the darkness of hell
breathed between the sheets
of my skin and fell
into a hurricane of colours
that raged through my mind,
I was drowning
in the disease of the moment.

A face fell flat
stared beyond us two;
the sun set in his eyes
until a second shot ran through
the sighs of the wind into side of his face
spitting pearls of fire all over the place.

The blast had turned the man into
an explosion of flesh and dust.
And once his eyes had leaked out
all that was human,
he had become a wasteland.
Baron for miles on end,
void of any horizon.