The Spoken Word [Portuguese translation]

We held hands on the last night on earth.

Our mouths filled with dust, we kissed in the fields and under trees,

screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves.

It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated

along the bottom of the river.

So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea

and the shattered seasons lay,

and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease.

In our cancer of passion you said, "Death is a midnight runner."

The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide.

We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes

of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress.

The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn

as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop.

The few insects skittered away in hopes of a better pastime.

I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked

if you would accompany me in a quick fall,

but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two.

I rode alone.

You said, "The cinders are falling like snow."

There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty,

bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence.

Of blue and grey.

Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carved our names in the flesh of the city.

The sun was stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon

and the darkness is a mystery of curves and lines.

Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward,

and somewhere in the wilderness we found salvation scratched

into the earth like a message.