Liquidator

Liquidator

I awoke to the earth being blasted asunder.

I ran to the window, assuming the West had struck.

Instead I saw that pillar of light:

A prismatic omen - a shimmering spectrum of brilliant color

far more grave in its presence than a cloud of bombers.

o o o o o

Scoop, scoop, break-time

I've heard the first on the scene weren't wearing suits.

That they ran headstrong into the phantom flames

and succumbed to burns too strange to treat.

The poor bastards.

What chance did they stand against an agent so malignant

that it casts its sickness into flesh and stone alike?

Scoop, scoop, lunchtime.

They had robots doing this work before us.

Soulless machines - brains placed far from the site

and into the hands of men -

killed themselves.

I saw footage of a twelve-ton drone of silicon and steel

throw itself from the roof and join the rubble. Haunting.

Scoop, scoop, run.

This is not the world as I remember it.

Where birds once sang, shovels scrape toxic concrete.

The savory spring air now tastes of leaden dew

and stings my face like a nail in a cursed doll.

Where I once saw silver, there are only envenomed veins

that pulse with the same dying blood that I now share.

Scoop, scoop, cough.

This place is a soldered scar.

A reeking crater that's deathly fumes

waft to the heavens to fall upon the greens and browns

to turn them black and gray.

That is why we work.

To entomb the sweltering, sterile cyst of Block-Four.

Scoop, scoop...

I will surely die from this,

but I do so for the sake of this world - divided

and threatened evermore by our futile plants and

cleaving wall.

This crypt we build will hold the atom's rage

until the day that sickle and stripes converge.

Cough, cough...scoop. - A.T. Buesching