My hand, held to the glare of this burnt impasse Yours, necessarily on the other side of some sickly meta-xis You're stopped in stasis, matched with mine I'll quantify time with meter With rhyme to calculate a way to prove that you are alive Isolated, trapped between A picture of you now stained on the street Oh mother, teach me how to die In your shadow I saw to a distant future Your life was only a nominal fee Singing the sound of silence, signaling the end They took your life, mother, as a pretense to pretend The hand that feeds us sat you down Covered my eyes, thrusted the styli Retraced the timeline to call it suicide Will you wait for me? Death was the chorus; our lives framed in refrain Softly we sing notes better sung by our dead I'd rather sleep and see you soon than die alone In the wake of this nuclear catastrophe We were meant to create, you spoke us out of nothing Out of the chaos we've caused Naked we came, shadows we leave Salt of the earth: Preserve their songs Light of the world: Burn out the shadows Infinite echoes of stifled screams The abyss you've created will ever stare back into me