Maxwell I. Gold
Cradled in brown, dirty, and spike-covered canyons of manufactured entropy against the hot, flaming bosoms of industrial masters; silvery oil belched from molten stomachs—unable to be contained in the old, glass-bodies whose wings shimmered in shadow and ash below old cities. There were those who spoke in muddled tongues, of metallic forges packed deep under the cement bottoms of nameless cities and bemoaned the horror of the Mechanical Things. Worse than the fear-drunk delusions of an old world, standing taller than everything, a clock like stereopticon whose puckish crystallizations of time haunted the ruins of the present with ghosts of what used-to-be.
The awful bastards of gods older than the oldest stars, fourteen billion years at the beginning of existence, rose higher over the emerald skies whose unsettling particulates discolored the world with the music of something tenebrific and wild. The weary clock face flickered in and out, unable to hold the terrible burden any longer—stale light crashed with explosive relief throughout the putrid air.
Few remained after the clock fell, deserted and empty, the cities became bleak monuments doomed to oxidize beneath a cruel daytime star, once the forges collapsed, wrought by some splendid, winged death. Cold, filled with dust and regret, the sand and shadow asphyxiated any remnant possibility of sanguinity, replaced by the demented muddled tongues—cackling through broken glass and bent dreams inside the ruins of metallic forges lost under the cement bottoms of nameless cities.