Self-destruct

Self-destruct

War babies

Wander broken halls

Tired apartment buildings

Smoulder

Battle-scarred,

The charred skeletons

Of forgotten empires.

A blood red sky filters

Old light

Traversing twisted towers

Funnelling reflections

Through cracked mirrors

Washing grey walls

Crimson.

Brash balustrades

Twist and turn

At jaunty angles

Barely attached.

Reality is just a shadow

On the wall

A theatre.

Tortured souls drag themselves

Across threadbare carpets

Carrying chipped cups

Rimmed in gold

Rimed in mould

Collected in better times

When bodies were centrally heated.

The old world lies in ruins

Splintered thoughts

Of difference

Held loosely together

In misty clusters

As storytellers gather

An assembly

Of misremembered words.

Nothing remains untouched

Memories of other lives

Lie in disarray

Lost

At the bottom of cluttered wardrobes

Left

In bedrooms shuttered from the cold

Ghostly arcades

Battened down

Buried beneath fallen arches

Broken remnants

Of the past

Haunting the graves

Of the newly born.