My hand, held to the glare
of this burnt impasse
Yours, necessarily on the other side
of some sickly meta-xis
You're stopped in stasis,
matched with mine
I'll quantify time
with meter, with rhyme
To calculate a way to prove
that you are alive
Isolated, trapped between a picture of you
now stained on the street
Oh mother, teach me how to die
In your shadow I saw to a distant future
Your life was only a nominal fee
Singing the sound of silence,
signaling the end
They took your life, mother,
as a pretense to pretend
The hand that feeds us sat you down
Covered my eyes, thrusted the styli
Retraced the timeline
to call it suicide
Will you wait for me?
Death was the chorus,
our lives framed in refrain
Softly we sing
notes better sung by our dead
I'd rather sleep and see you soon
than die alone in the wake
of this nuclear catastrophe
We were meant to create,
You spoke us out of nothing
Out of the chaos we've caused
Naked we came, shadows we leave
Salt of the earth: Preserve their songs
Light of the world: Burn out the shadows
Infinite echoes of stifled screams
The abyss you've created
will ever stare back into me
Will you wait for me?