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Final Hours of Pompeii.

"God perceives no continuity in the rainbow. Every color is distinct from every other; he sees a world encrusted totally in jewels, materially transformed by the passage of shadows" --@ctrlcreep

Agitated operating system.

"A Valley of Applause

Is this where we would have had to go?
We might have made it here –
the other side of a bridge
from everyone we loved,
our plans, the shape we’d made
in the universe’s lack.

Just off a train,
the rails curling round
and out of sight
we could, your hand in mine,
have stood a state of willed amnesia –
the sky a pyre – shaken off our shame
like dogs who’d swum through oil.

Frontier life,
water and shelter life,
imagine our first night:
unstoried earth to walk on,
a river to wash our hands
and mouths with,
hills to stop our gods from staring in.

The only words we’d need
would be ‘I’m safe’
or ‘start again’,
your scent a lotus flower,
my skin broken by your teeth
like soft applause.

Remember you said
we should admit the way we felt
however difficult?
I’m saying now,
too late for you to waste your life.
Here isn’t where we would have gone

but where I always was:
cut off from sun,
green-shadowed on all sides by noble boundaries.
The sky is hellfire.
I burn like coal,
whose heart is unforgetful coal. "

--Declan Ryan in Poetry Ireland

Empress circa 1973.