Black Zone

The doors are all open, and the windows
Of the city are caked with dust,
So much so that they appear to be
A frosted yellow-grey. A sickly color,
Like the enamel of a dead woman's teeth.
Everything reeks of mold and mothballs.

Here lies urbanity, left to the weeds
And the wolves, and the browsing deer
That even now birth braying horrors;
Dying things with extra legs or heads,
Or born blind, left to die stumbling in the streets.
It is said that they can sense
Earthquakes. So why not this?

One should think there'd be something,
Anything, some kind of warning.
Maybe in the way that the grass
All tastes like metal, or leaves a tingling,
A numbness inside your mouth.
But they don't realize, and nobody tells them,
And so here Dereliction, the final lasting
Song of men, plays endlessly on summer winds,
Like violins played reverse on tape loop.
Familiar and yet horrifyingly wrong.
And because nobody hears it,
Nobody ever presses stop.
The same song, playing over and over
Again. For the next nine centuries.

In this place, there hangs a Death
More still, more perfect, more enduring
Than anyone will ever know.
It lies in an empty sarcophagus, forever sealed,
And in the corpses of memories
Which lay strewn in all directions.
It lies in homes, in schools, in empty playgrounds,
And in orthodox shrines, tucked away still
In the abandoned closets of all those
Long-gone peasant babushkas.

Dead memories, dead dreams,
Dead lives everywhere.
And all of it, dead in a way
That not even the flies will touch.


--Milo David Freeman, 05/08/2006