We live like rats, but we pretend that we are gleaming angels, with eyes glistening gold. As we scrabble in our cages, festering in our own faeces. The desperate screams of the desolate and lost are deafening in the twilight. They echo amongst the ashes and the twisted metal and glass. The broken people are cast out into the night as the walls crumble and the buildings of the city glow orange from the fires that burn incessantly.

All is wreckage, all is alight. The broken hearted and the deceived hold each other, cling to each other in the endless rain: all they know is pain and all they fear is hate. The foundations that we built were faulty, so we had to destroy and rebuild. And now we climb over each other, clawing over cadavers to reach the sunlight. The sky is choked with chemicals and polystyrene stars. Playgrounds lie empty, there is no laughter now. The roundabout rusts alone; the chains on the swings are left gently swaying in the bitter wind.

We rejected love. We could not find a use for it, so we slit it’s throat and ripped it open, then we left it bleeding from the wound, displayed for public perusal, hanging upside down from a tree. Judgment has been passed and it has been found wanting. We reject it and all it stands for, as trust can never be rightfully placed in humanity, affixing perceived value to scurrilous fakes. Everyone has been bred with the same fatal flaw, a critical weakness that sets them apart the mindless beasts. This weakness is vacuous self interest and commoditisation of the useless and false. Engaged in constant belligerent affectations, but when everything is stripped away, just lumps of sugary meat. Reciprocity is an abject impossibility, where people are only interested in themselves and what they can accumulate around them.

And now we dance around the fires that burn in the centre of the courtyard. There are children singing, but they do not realise that this is the end. Their voices sound like tinkling glasses, and there remains a shining hope within them. Only the grownups know that there is no way to save us. The adults try and shelter the children from the falling heavens, but all they want to do is play and celebrate their unencumbered freedom.

They make kites out of the clothing they tear from the bodies. They do not have time for the cataclysm. It matters not that the rivers are battery acid and the sky has been torn open. The mania has not reached them. The children have become accustomed to the decaying bodies. Their instinctual repellent responses have been habitually replaced by apathy and ambivalence. The bodies have become their stinking, rancid playthings. They have become so desensitised to the adults that cry and pull out their hair and scrape at their eyelids, praying for salvation.

The big people secretly know that their prayers will go unanswered and they have been forsaken. Yet again, they have misplaced their faith in an uncaring messiah. He rejoices in their suffering and joyously guffaws at their attempts to placate his rage. He looks upon them with piteous disgust as they clamber over each other to reach into the clouds. Their savagery amuses Him as they pull and scrape at each others faces. They will do anything to survive, but there is no way out of this final eclipse. They have failed Him. And now He will not save them. They will be left to their fate and their shiny clothing is useless as it is torn from their backs and their skin is pierced with unfamiliar fingernails.

The shops are all empty and all of the windows are broken. The walls have been painted with the coagulated blood and excretions of the dead. Lurid images of politicians with bloody nooses around their necks are daubed on every street corner. The great billboards have been shattered and the eyes of the smiling two dimensional liars have been scraped out. Shit has been smeared on their gleaming teeth and their perfect salon haircuts have been dishevelled and distorted with human hair, rent from the carcasses that litter the alleyways. Corrupt businessmen swing from streetlights in the cracked sodium smoulder. Their pennies did not save them and their polished words were futile.

There are bodies everywhere. Some of them are living and fucking and screaming and crying and some are clinging to the cusp of death, rattling their last breaths, cursing their perpetual misfortune. Some of them scratch around in the dirt, frantically trying to gather up the scraps of money that have been discarded in the streets. Some of them are trying to hunt down the depraved pervert that has been cutting out the cunts from the corpses. But, it is as useless now as it ever was. Some drink to try and forget their impending fate. Some stuff rotten food in their mouths, trying to recapture the days when food was fresh and organic and responsibly sourced.

Urine stains accumulate on the trousers of the weak. They tried to organise, mobilise and incentivise, for a time. But their attempts were fruitless. Without law and rigorous structure, they return to the natural state of chaos and disorder. Then they tried draconian violence and this was equally as destructive. They tried to crack down on the audacious uprising, but to no avail. This just led to more death and more bodies clogging the rivers with further body parts and effluent and meaningless liquefied filth.

And at the centre of it all, an elderly couple are slow dancing around the great fire in the town square, as a single plastic teardrop falls from the sightless eyes of the old man: his blindness is perfection, absolute. He has seen true pain and sacrifice and it is etched in his milky cataracts. As they revolve, the couple are unaware of anything around them and he will not let her go. Her cotton summer dress is crushed under his arms, and her thick veined legs are starting to show. He clutches at her face, his careless fingers pleading for answers, but he will not stop dancing. He dances onwards, murmuring a song that they used to share together, it belonged to them and no one else could take it away from them. This sweet melody brings back smiling memories of teapots, trips to the seaside and holding hands in darkened cinema aisles.

He simply will not accept that she is already gone. He is not prepared to admit that she has stopped breathing. The cracked cubic zirconium teardrop falls in slow motion and reflects all of the destruction and hate and despair as it lands upon the scorched ground. And then as he lets her body slip from his grasp, the sky caves in. As his sightless eyes turn to look upon his obliteration, it becomes clear to him that we were nothing more than a momentary whimper in the endless cascade of entropic chaos, and as the daylight splits the horizon, he sees once more.