There are dreams, yes -- visions of you, pale and backlit in doorways, stepping through the years with the slow certainty of a ghost who knows his end and comes toward it unflinching. dreams where you lean down to me -- always limp, always lifeless -- and tell me, with a tenderness reserved for war criminals and saints, that you are the spirit of our age and the fire to come. that you are the mother of endings and the father of that bright and terrible light which will lay all things bare. and no one, you say, would dare drop the bomb on nagasaki.
no one, of course, but you.
you -- who carries the infernal child in your belly, ticking. you -- who clutches the great red button between your teeth like a communion wafer. you -- who says oh well when asked what love has cost, and toss the keys to the heavens into the dust like a spent match. let it burn, you say. let it burn and let them cheer. and they will. god help me, they will.
there is a lake we could go to, where the leaves turn terracore and the air bites like metal. there is a siren howling in a language no one speaks. there is a stone with your name carved into it and the ash of a quarter-million dead tucked beneath. and when the hour comes -- when you descend again from whatever heaven they’ve built for men like you -- this baby’s gonna blow. and it will be beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
