Escape

Getting off the planet nondescriptly.

I watched the skies turn grey.
I watched fields of green turn to ash.
Roads crumbled beneath rusting steel
skeletons and pulverized cherished places.
I was still alive
to see people burn amongst the flames
that licked away their skin.
When the earth split and gurgled
lava up like the blood from a gunshot wound
I thought that that was when I’d die.
But the transport ships had landed
just in the nick of time.
When I boarded one of the many nuclear machines
I looked back over my home
and through the black smoke and flames
I thought I saw a horseman.
He rode at a feverish pace through the quakes
that shook and rattled down the remaining buildings
like a dog shakes away water from its coat.
The door on my transport closed
before I could see where he was going
but I managed to get to a window
to see the crust of the Earth lurch and fall into
bubbling boiling molten rock that
churned and contorted into every angle
as if it were slithering like a snake out from its core.
And when the world around me slowly turned to black
I knew that everything was gone.