The Waste World

She said create the world, so I did. I made it dark and dusty, coughed up from my own black lungs. I gave the trees an ashen hue and the ground a color to match the starless sky. The creatures were murmuring oozes, globs of drying acrylic that inked across the orb of my bubbling imagination.

Repulsing, it was in fact the product of an industrial mind. I was born from man's smog goddess and, if memory serves me, her breath was laced in exhaust which I inhaled nightly with her songs. She was soothing and complacent, her voice smokey like a hazy bar. No one could deny her features were hideous beyond belief. Her skin dripped pollution like morphine into veins, into deep red rivers to turn them ebony and clogged. Her eyes glistened obsidian, sharp and cold if you didn't know her at all. I knew she was lost and ashamed, as her mother, my grandmother, would often remind her of the destruction her presence caused. I loved her like grandmother nature never could.

Grandmother was ,indeed, a grand mother; full of herself, and rightfully so, she was beautiful. Shoulder blades smooth as sand dunes, hair blue and ever-moving. Her voice was a harmony of every heartbreaking, lovemaking bird song. The first time I laid eyes on her I wanted nothing more than banishment to the darkest corners of space - her beauty thundered and eroded my significance to an awful pebble. My mother was nothing more than a shadow come alive and grandmother nature wanted her suffocating daughter gone - swept away like cigarette smoke.

So mother and I gathered our clouds up into our lungs, soaked up chemicals we sweated in our separate stratospheric rooms and the air was clear for the first time. Man rejoiced, their hallelujahs pounding rejection onto my eardrums. Mother held my hand tight as cancerous cells and wept acid rain to dispel their unashamed disregard for our leaving. They settled, shrugged and raising their umbrellas went about their day. Still, the time for moving on was now. Mother bent down to my level, eyes glassy and black, "Sweetheart, create a world for you and me. Make a place where we will be loved for our horrid condition."

The taste of metal always on our tongue, carbon monoxide seeping through our pores, bathing in the radiation of our black hole sun; dank and disturbed is where we are loved.