Inescapably dreaming in some other half-deserted mind,
There were only flowers for graves.
Flowers for weddings and flowers
For the sick were almost gone now.
There were no flowers. Plants had fallen to the
Same whims and lusts that had themselves fallen,
As parasitic vines that kill their hosts and then must
Die themselves, these whims and lusts had
Killed their hosts, but I dare not say those desires had died.

There was a window, bright and clear,
Bearing the hoarfrost of another morn.
Another evening’s leftovers.
When will there be any leftovers?
A leftover world will leave nothing behind.

(A little girl’s doll had no new dresses,
No hair, no doll’s house.)

The air, rank and cold: I’d smelled that air before,
In some other dream I chose to forget.
Sometimes the chosen path is not followed.
And now I remember too vividly,
What was missing.

It was missing, not to be seen through frosted windows,
Not to be seen in streets or meadows.

(This little doll had none either)

It was missing, not to be felt or sensed or reminded.

Nothing stirred.

There was no life. This little doll had none.
There was no life.

I’d smelled that air before, but I remember.
The cold steel smell of the railway,
but it wasn’t the railway.
The rank and musky odor of the caves,
But it wasn’t the caves.
No, that air scared me. I thought not to
inhale the source of my fear, but chose not to
die as a result of my fear.

There were buildings, crumbled.
There was a shattered earth,
Amidst a cold, deadly silence.
A sobering silence,

That in this half-deserted mind seemed so sublime.
I could barely place the memories of faces
into a context of the people they represented.
They were gone now.

Only a shattering silence,
A rank, cold, industrial smell
reached into my nostrils and strangled my brain.
For a fleeting moment, I believed something.
Now it was gone.

I know not whether what I believed was real,
imagined, or whether I even believed it or not.

This was war.

A war we won.

Me and this little hairless, lifeless doll.
We are humanity.