Elegy

I stood in-between two separate worlds. Before me one existed in utter decay, with stagnant seas and fractured skies. The land itself was a tundra of sorts; ravaged, broken and still, like a shattered corpse.1

The only life existed in dead trees, with writhing branches, reaching to the heavens, stretching like skeletal hands, rising from a grave of scarred soil. Parasitic and agoraphobic, these saproxylic beings seemed satisfied, consuming the bark of haunting ancestral memories. They were so becoming, in miserably hideous skin, draped in the shades of another's light.2

I saw one hanging from a limb, dangling and engaged to a wrecked branch; in the shape of a ring finger. For where a band would have adorned an eager bride, he had carved an epitaph. I peered in for a look, to find black sap bleeding from open lacerations. In a subtle, solemn honesty it seemed to state what the others had come to deny. “I set my love ablaze,” it confessed, “and feasted on the ashes, consumed and filled my stomach with dead memories.” Scribbled in a vampiric fashion, these letters broke upon me, terribly. In a bitter conclusion it read, “Still the greatest lament is now none will consume me.” Such sorrow, as if he knew he would hang there forever, untouched, unbothered, unnoticed...3

In a fervent haste I turned my back on this world and faced the other. The sky here was bright and the sea was strong. Wind breathed life to a healthy world. The land was fashioned green and in my omniscient eyes I saw the beings celebrating life.4

Closer I looked and to my surprise I had caught in the corner of my eyes a tower on the horizon. Here a man draped in gold stood, yet as he watched the world he sobbed. Upon reaching him I asked what was wrong and he spoke in the euphoric tongues of tragedy. “Broken upon my eyes do tell / The hole is where the heart did once dwell / Never then saw heaven so well / And my salvation has become my hell…” His voice faded and as he watched, trailing off into a mundane, strangling tone. Yet he was so detached, he was in fact not alive at all.5

Turning again to those he watched with his misanthropic gaze, I paid closer attention. I found them consumed by polite falsehoods; they were not so alive as first perceived; composed of synthetic flesh and nebulous heads, outside alive, but inside so dead. I saw they too consumed death like the saproxylic beings from the grey world before. They feasted upon dead creatures, they prayed to a dead god, nailed to a dead tree, and they purchased death from death dealers that led them to death. They even breathed dead air from noxious lungs and toxic tongues into a dying environment. The two worlds were exactly the same, I realized, and the only paradox was in delusional minds.6

My place in space seemed mesmerizing as I read the labels above each. Such deceit, drawn to mislead, I scattered plaques reading: Heaven. And Hell. I rearranged the colors in space around the planets and soon they blurred together. Ecstatic with my success/failure I made a new label and nailed it above this travesty. Illuminated by the light of ghost stars until the sun burns out, the letters would ever read: E–A–R–T–H.7