Wasteland

It started with the fear, the fear came before the fire that burned away all that we
had known- ever known. Hell, the fire burned away all we had ever hoped to know.
The world was ash, the shadows of people flashed into walls and doors, onto chairs
and beds before the fires came to sweep away humanity like the refuse riding before
the janitor's broom in some forgotten school building with it's worn brick exteriors.

The roads and deserts were turned to glass, smooth to the touch yet non-reflective
under the merciless sun, which once had warmed us thanks to the atmosphere's
ability to shield us from the solar radiation that now sears away the desire to sit
out in the sun. Yes, even the very idea of sunbathing seems like a wild idea
that is more a myth now than the memory of nearly naked people on the sands.

The skyscrapers stand out like skeletons on some undead army trapped alone
in the cities that are more like cavernous ravines of crumpled civilization
mocking all that had been considered modern and new rusting in the infrequent
rains that still come when enough moisture can permeate the air to rise and
fall like the ghosts of those friends and families that wanders this silent earth.

We used to be God's chosen people left to mind this once green world, but now
those of us who survive are only the fugitives running from the sins of our
father's who squandered their stewardship choosing to deny that whether a God
told us to take care of our home or some evolutionary sense of reason would
reveal to us this basic truth that we are all one before the fires would come.

The wasteland stretches out before me, so close that I can almost smell the acrid
harvest of scorched grasses once amber now gray swaying in the wind,
The seas rose to swallow the land before they boiled away into the scattered
rains that still come to kiss the scarred surface that lies even now beneath my feet.
I will walk away into the past since that is all that's left- this world that we have made.