A poem about despair, inevitable doom,

and the emotions that so aggressively intrude upon your soul

Thick gray clouds of smoke scorched the canvas sky

like the angry brush strokes of a frustrated artist

The earth’s labored moan echoed through fissures in the ground

like the last breath of a dying musician purged through a broken tuba

melodies magically fold ear lobes into origami shields

Anchors shackled to wrists and ankles;

he had drowned underneath the sound of everything else

She had been begging to be noticed, to be heard,

but she was in a foreign land, she spoke a foreign language,

and she donned the dress of a forbidden faction