The forests glow the florid hue
of eternal dawn, or eternal dusk.

The infernal shrouded hours
of senescence, or creation;

brothers in the ellipses.

Sturdy and weary and moribund
men; featureless, smooth bastions

of the gloam.

Battling lucent flame, and greater
existential foe:

that men possess an inveterate home.

The cities smolder and reek
with forest exhume.

Elderly dead, statues of the heat.

In the plazas and bazaars,
humanity slinks like masked thieves,

bumbling and blind
through the labyrinth of smoke.

And on and on,
to the far Siberia’s of the earth,
industry’s furnace burns
without quell,

master of the dark.