Subway to the Outside
I sit in a tube; a carriage of white walls.
Cold steely air stirs from a shaft somewhere.
The soft whistle of a door sliding shut,
A metallic grunt easing out into the world.

The shutter of a camera flashes outside;
Darkness and day like frozen vignettes.
The manufactured masterpiece we live in
transitions into a world stripped away of its former glory.

Despair greets me in stills,
like a film left to age.
Not a speck of white
in the grayscale horizon.

The crooked fingers of an old lady clawing at the bleak sky
is all that remains of our home.
Once the pinnacle of mankind,
now a towering tomb.

Quarantined from the rays and fumes,
I am but an alien to this desolation.
A looker of the past, a gazer of the abyss.
Never to understand.