am i a nail in your coffin?

did you deserve me? i ask as if i am a punishment that must be overcome to avoid the gates of hell, the fiery pit. we took long walks through a desert paved with rusty surgical instruments and dull kitchen utensils. you are my tetanus blanket, she replies offhand, not even looking in my direction. underneath the mutilated skies of this vacant city, buried beneath carrion, through broken glass windows furtively, across the empty seas to distant crude oil beaches. we will splash in the toxic waste, frolic in the plague, we will have agent orange coctails and dream of cruises to the molten surface of mercury. we were drug across hardscrabble fields covered in broken gravel, until the scars on our back congealed and coagulated to create a map to escape this fate. we drink mount vesuvius, we lay down to sleep under cinder and cement, hugging ourselves close without ever touching. what color are my eyes? i ask. she looks paniced, what?! why would you ask me that? what kind of question is that? it's a fair question. i reply. she wanders further away, drifting off, distracted by a burnt ochre sun. they're the same color they have always been, she says to a cockroach below her feet, they are black. black hole black. they are a vacuum from which none ever escapes. then she turned her head away from me, and shuffled away, her footprints leaving fallout dust clouds to mark her passing.