Mitchel David Ring

Aftermath

With every passing second more of the fog clears, each breath sweeter than the last...

Softly, as though the shadows might hear us we crept the length of the hall...

These dark skies and darker lands rolling on and on to blind cliffs above the graveyard of the damned...

Edges so ragged they do not know themselves on a rendezvous at the far side of infinity...

Out of all these fragments a message comes, the decayed whispering a constant warning...

On our knees before the King in Red we heed the master’s call to serve...

Salt on skin bare to the sun burns like that high fire flowing through canals from scar to scar...

All these nights spent on backroads, peering into the woods at watching eyes passing us by as stars of a winter sky...

Desperation is the song of lost souls slipping away toward something so far beyond that even starlight is a distant memory...

...the long months breaking like endless waves high upon the hills and in the drowned valleys...

In dim light the others come through wearing faces sewn from silk and gold...

Let the Earth bury me here, beneath slow winds and shifting sand...

Again and again the walls speak— always the same words drowned out by echoes of the conversation in the room...

There is a tower risen out of sand, a wall built to touch both horizons at the edges fallen into raging seas...

These phantoms come crawling out of shadow eyes like dead stars, mouths twisted into smiles...