a rake scrapes across the concrete, skull fragments in strips across the green lawns. as well as dark brown red and yellow leaves piled in insurmountable hills, i run like a maniac and dive face first into their fragrant embrace. the sky sits blue like a mother hen on the earth, her egg, soon to hatch and shake off the lives of mites and other surface creatures, the shell cast off into space carelessly. i lost count of the tremors, eighteen months now of constant fear that the end is near, we're all choking on the words they feed through tubes down our throats in our living rooms. we all wait to awake from this nightmare, a cloud of steam erupts from a crack in the surface, we worthlessy run like the mercy of some supreme power is going to pull and protect our scurrying forms from the cosmic defect not realized when the clock was originally assembled. tick tock tick tock continued, continues to tick and tock the universe heaves and breathes we drop like leaves from its branches, piled up and decaying.