The sky smouldered with thick soot from burnt gasoline
bleeds charred rain and in a grove, a fuchsia scent of dead gardenia
smoke into the heavens. A flock of birds fly hazily into carbon fumes
and juveniles with ashen sclera cling to their dusty inhalers.
A litter of detritus lay before our portico, our mouths, a husk of unripe dirges.
This is how we weather our own rain of destruction:
a cirrus vomiting comets of brimstone, a thick hail smothering our eyes,
corrosion diseasing metals and the blighting of melanised skin.
The rain burnt into ash by the ceaseless oil spill. A shoal of fishes
groaning in thirst, their gills sickened by the cancer of contaminated waters.
Sewage bags dumped into the trough of sea beds to choke the larynx
of water as it exhales every stream run. The world— a perfect ruin
orchestrated by our collective neglect. On my lips something burns like oil
like the ravaging tongue of a volcanic sun on farmlands in the East?
Put a measure of the soil into your mouth and the Celsius scale reads fire—
the world a city set ablaze a perfect ruin orchestrated by our collective neglect.
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