Last Known Sighting

Highsummer golden light and we are caught
Between shadowed forest and brilliant tidestruck beach
Memory carries hallucinatory clarity
But it's not good enough for proof

Which amounts to a skittering muted recording
(That could be anything)
And a grainy pixellated photo of
You stumbling towards the shuttered trees
And me with a handful of scrambled magnetic wails

Through the Rust and Gasoline (dreamtime rehash)

It's raining, and it could very well have been a solid forty days and nights for all the difference the passage of time makes here.  Time is marked by the starting of fires and the slow rise of greasy black smoke into the slightly paler clouds.  It's marked by the slow change of steel to reddish powder and by the transmutation of bright copper wire to burnt verdigris.  Occasionally, it's marked by the sudden collapse of dysfunctional machinery into a tangle of useless scrap.

There are marks on the ground as well.  Muddy prints of boots tracked through the mud, filling up slowly with iridescent-skinned water.  It smells like oil and burning jet fuel with a faint hint of contraband and cordite. Sometimes it smells like rotting garbage or burning meat.

It's still raining.  You're shivering in the crumpled husk of a Lear jet, waiting for the pilot and not seeming to realize that he's slowly liquefying in the cabin up front.

Somewhere half a mile up, a vulture angel with steel wings circles lazily.