[these are two snapshot jots. I wrote these for a school contest. needless to say, i lost, and the world is a grim pit full of contrary justice... yeah right.]

-Autumn
Veined gems float on the dying gusts of Autumn. Rich-palleted windfall-paper smear the glossy roads with their pre-death glory; little botanical corpses of corpus beauty. The bearing of fallen leaves exemplify the scorching, contrary rituals of Nature; beauty is most present after the birth of glory and prior to the secular end of it. Swearing oaths of fealty to the evening sun, they are born in death as rubies and scarlet shrines to paradise, quiet adonis geists raging silently in a theatre of deciduity.

Bright laburnum autumnales flaunt their coveted poison, visual sonatas of perfect principles. Launching with lavish tiles of red and plates of amber, a river of crystal breath can travel between the avenues of trees eternally, leaving in its hushedly tangent wake a maelstrom of slowly floating confetti.

The final celebration of life before a season of night; an elegy for the creatures of the earth; or the farewell vacation of justice drama in favor of the frigid, barren mistress of winter.

Fall leaves are the well-dressed bone-pale bodies lying in an infinity of time-just as we are born, we are unborn, and replaced with next season's batch of life. While we waste away, they grow and prosper. Every worm-eaten hole in our afterlife Armani is a sacrifice for Autumn's pyretic display of grandiose valediction. Little wizened, pregnant kaisers of the human destiny, ceding to cycle. No solemnity or celebrity for our burial, just acceptance.


-Cancer



The cancer ward houses bald pated patients of every age. The little girl lying still on the paisley bedspread lost her hair two months ago, when she endeavored to risk the rigors of a chemotherapy regimen. Only a few wisps of her once rich, chocolate-dark locks remain, as if a forest fire has spared only the rarest of tree-species and a wasted landscape were the only vista.

Her parents stand over her, two people to whom she depends upon despite the hopelessness of her despair. Her mood is as deep sapphire as her eyes; a tropical storm has blown the entirety of the sea into the caverns of her soul. Only nine, she knows that death is the surest of institutions, and time is only a ragtag border against it.

She wishes she could live, as do her parents. They kiss her forehead as they exit, as visitation hours will soon elapse. This day could be their last with their wasted daughter; if not tomorrow, she may expire with each day that ends.

They have abandoned faith and the virtue of hope, recognizing the cold indifference of death in a world where the young are taken as surely and viciously as any other. They have little else for which to live. When their daughter, the bond of their relationship, dies and shivers in the dusty death-shawl thrown across all those who have gone before her, they will surely divorce. Neither will invest the effort necessary to attain happiness. Pity them.