1.

you and me buddy walking down along the tracks just like in the old days when we were 15 and the strongest substance yet taken: Led Zeppelin II. but on this day the tracks are a single track, and this a single chitinous black tubular rail, obsidian textured, and the shuttles fly so fast you can hear the sonic booms, they erupt out in the sightless horizon like explosions of ordinance. curiously, the tracks are still graded and banked with gray gravel, just like in the old days, old old days, the ancient days of automobiles, ancient days freshly hated and never forgotten. how could you? the sky an ugly yellow like the wings of the locust like tar colored phlegm from nicotine lungs, nauseous mists are the clouds, I guess they must move, but don't see how. Nonetheless for our walk down the singing vibration black vein in the land obsidian track we wear our loose garments textured for ventilation and infused with blown and pixellated glass the better to refract and deflect the killing rays of the naked sun. I can't see your eyes, friend, from behind the black globes of your goggles, and you can't see mine, but we are both in the System as BrownEyes and this is an important fact for to be not in the System is to remain outside on the surface of the planet forever and so to die in the terrible, ceasless light. This too, a curious fact, no one knows what has happened to the night, only that it doesn't occur here for months at a time, the latitudes could tell their tale had they not shifted no doubt but endless technology has made us primitive as ants and we do not question. At any rate, I do not. You were always the curious, searching one, and no doubt still are, but here on our first day back from the long silence of Death, I am remembering too many other things, questioning some, savoring none. Savoring none.



2.

we trudged along. I think our bodies came out stronger than our brains or at least our conciousness because I trudged for very many hours and first become aware of another, then that it was you, and the way I could tell was the shape of the bones in your face, highbrow, the cut of your jawline. and the white hair flowing back from the mirrors of your turban. white hair. we stopped and regarded each other across the black line and gray grade of the track and then I saw my own face reflected in the violent bruise-like lenses of your goggles and my short beard and sideburns were white, white as new snow in December from the long dead mountain town of our youth, long dead town, long dead youth: but no. youth is the bones of my face beneath the old man's beard and that is when I recognize who I am in relation to you and that is when I realize that we are here and the germ of that thought is no doubt like the germs of our DNA somewhere, in some found locale, some tomb or grave, who knows why we're here or how, whom to thank, or curse, or whom to refer the insanity of our denial, our acceptance. Friend, I trafficked in insanity once, it was not so bad, it was a vision of the wars to come - but what of you, how do you fare? Then I remembered that in your first life your view of insanity was also the world's, that terrible day, that one day. Indeed you saw more than I or most. At first they thought it was paper issuing from the holes in the Towers but later it was revealed to be wallboard particles and sheet gypsum. And when a body hits the ground after 10 seconds at that velocity from that height the body explodes and the extremities fly back up in the air. And you thought it was a Nuke when the skyline commenced its crumbledown shattering into apocalpse commencement topography a Nuke not yet but good guess, prescient, one way or the other: Depleted Uranium equals a 4.5 million year bar tab, bartender, and that equals forever, an eternal round for all my friends, take one down pass it around 99 bottles of