The Day We Realised

So men laid down,
Sick of their failed lives.
They would take no food, no drink;
They were told they hadn’t earned them.
They lay, and slowly rotted
Like houses. They rotted,
Inside slowly decaying and outside
Weather-beaten away.
The wicked sun wept such bitter tears
Her light faded, and the moon consumed her.
 
The streets lashed with silence
Brought the children blinking into the dark,
Their eyes swollen and sallow,
Alien to the city their parents had made them.
In the allies and gutters they gathered
And dug food from the waste,
Stuffing their mouths with maggots and flies.
They took what they found,
And the birds and beasts a fiction
They took from each other.
No fire, no heat, bloody chunks of meat
Filled their mouths, and made them sick.
Hunched and warped, they staggered,
Until they fell.
 
In silence, the cities fell.
Untended, the flesh they’d outgrown discarded and rotting,
The moon watched them fall.
The screens and lights, unwatched,
Grew weary with nothing to call to but each other,
And slowly faded, until the moon
Had no priests to sing her prayers.
 
So the men rose,
Empty shells of flesh and bone,
And shuffled through the streets.
Their skin hanging like rotten cotton
They stumbled, and looked for light.
But their empty eyes saw nothing.
So they took the cities and fed them back to life.
They took the children and ate them,
Feeding themselves and the screens and the lights.
 
One man sat,
One man who never knew the light of day.
Sat deep underground, buried in straw and rats
And never knew the cities above.
He lived, he breathed, he ate straw
And he drank the water that ran down the walls.
He gibbered, he raved, he fitted,
And the only dreams he knew were darkness.
 
The cities breathed. The cities lived.
The men had died years ago.