I remember when we

 I remember when we

            ruled the world. Our fires burned bright against the night sky, golden-red intensity that gleamed for what would be forever, atop endless mounds of fragmented bone and scorched metal. We sat on overturned cars and ate cold beans from cans that we had to bust open with hammers; the meat and fruit tasted sour so we spat them out onto the still warm asphalt and laughed because it looked like steaming piles of s**t. We danced wild jigs around playground swings that had melted into twisted, macabre shapes. We danced around them like those bent heaps of bubbled plastic like cannibals around totem gods. The entire world had been offered to us, for no good reason, but everyone else was dead, so it must have been. An old world burned to the ground, turned to nothing but constant ash that drifted into the sky like bitter snowflakes. We wrote stories in graffiti on windows caked in dust, mindless ideograms that meant nothing really, only indistinct words found in papers that hadn't been reduced to fuel for the massive fires, as well as neanderthal drawings of daily tasks. These tasks included pissing in trashcans and trapping the sewer rats in steel cages. I remember when we ruled the world. We thrived on remnants that had been left behind by those who had, ultimately, offered up their own destruction. We thanked them with great feasts of pigeon meat, and skewered dogs, barbequed into charred black things that barely tasted like meat at all. We held festivities of the most gratuitous sort, igniting more fires that spread and spread, spilling gasoline and oil into the streets and soon the streets were all engulfed in effulgent flame. We didn't need the cities, so we let them burn, turning the once towering structures into gigantic candles turning the air itself a dark gray, the color of scorched bone. We watched in awed reverence on hillsides as civilization swirled upward and upward. And the ash fell like leaves turning and twirling down, tattered remains, fluttering onto the ground. Christmas in July we cried aloud. Christmas in July we screamed until our throats were sore, then we sang in low voices nonsense songs that were vaguely remembered. We ruled the world. Yes. We rose up like Cain in a wilderness of sordid memories - relentless dreams that were never realized and failed aspirations of people that were but dispirited ghosts lingering among pale sidewalks, heads hung low underneath the languid haze of street-lamps. For a hundred, thousand, million years it seemed we sat upon thrones of crumpled aluminum.

           I remember before we became ghosts ourselves, the world regaining its vibrancy. The world bloomed once again with the eventual slowness of a rosebud furling into splayed petals. And thus the kings of dust, the emperors of rust. Fleeing underneath the fire pits we had once gloriously praised. Like cockroaches we scuttled and scratched ourselves little pockets within caverns of soot-colored walls and ceilings dripping with smooth black oil like candle wax forming sludge-piles on the ground.

           We waited once again for the world to empty. For the fires to settle down into drifting smoke and the ceaseless noise to quiet and to die down into infernal silence.