Coughing locomotives spit up soot, lonely tarmac now, that metal shells should choose to run down rails. Empty but for dollar drivers and rocking trailers that lag behind, full of bitter cooking apples swiped from unsuspecting trees.

Full divinity violated by harvest vehicles.

Shonee stands beneath shelter tin roof. Legs cold rigid. Sopping grey matted hair. A glint in his eye like violence, but altogether more entertained. Smoke lungs fogged up. Breathing out into cold air, he looks to time on his wrist, sucking life out from his arteries.

Piya, all black-tinted auburn hair and heels in high abandon, sits quiet. Having seen large stomached workmen sweat, she rests, the day a misadventure of unspent sexuality.

Shonee moves cheek sweeping fingertips, gracing warm touch to white pale skin. Each melanoma riddled form consoled by such meagre acts of sympathy. Though all the while, it strikes, for him, a different cord. Love much less known than fate.

Across the fall land; fields of dry dead sunflowers run down to rusting railway tracks. Cut up by sharp-friendly, lonely-discarded canned soup lids. All becomes smut below this pair of match struck lovers. Held warmth in amber palms. Tampered to the end of firepaper.

Now slack bodies are ill and sour jokes of dreams involving stand-up, sit-down, lay-down visions. All the visions he can muster, with moving picture imagination that now rotted with its own absence. Her face fading with the light. Sleeping, stars appear in velvet-straw lined skies. Clouds speaking silent vespers to a mass of energy that rides them.

Hours late Jenus sings a sutra of battered rhymes along whistle path, coming human interaction, he greets slack and sandy tongues. To wake fallen comrades his noise increases.

Rain falls loud as a pattering life opus. Night glides haphazardly away in a drunken stupor. Morning a racing headache world; where every movement aches.

Behind shelter tin roof and crumble brick walls flies kiss snapped spines that line pebbled banks of twisting writhing stream. Each owing slow mortality to insane Piya’s savagery, blood spatter pearls; a smile to greet each creature’s misery.

Rusty tins hold her ammunition tight packed. While a wailing fence of baby birds, all pinned miniature wings, becomes target to practice shooting. Bones and ribs are smashed smithereens. Squawking mother bird a sound that falls on distant attention spans, next to die she morns crucified chicks, till she herself is stolen from the world.

Other thing’s nightmares all worry like water off crude oil feathers. Night tumbles in, and then morning staggers about till time is idealistic fantasy, and wrinkle lines accepted parts of shattered mirrors.