Midas’ Nightmare

I awoke to a world embellished in gold

where nothing of the earth

seemed to bloom

from the dirt.

I could feel that my own bones

were contained, gilded.

-

Every gilded

creature stared at me, gold

eyes boring into my very bones.

I was the only creature capable of breath on Earth —

my fingers dug into the dirt,

vying for a sacred bloom.

-

Nothing could bloom

in the gilded

dirt.

Midas had no greater nightmare than gold

terrors roaming the earth,

scavenging on bones.

-

Skeletons that moved deep into the earth, bones

that were their own flowers, bloom

soft marrow. Earth

born evolution let these flowers grow in this gilded

nightmare. Gold

became soil, metal became dirt.

-

When the creatures pounced on me, I grasped for the dirt.

I begged to the soil that I would not become a series of bones.

joining this gold

landscape and become a corpse, set to bloom

and evolve into gilded

earth.

-

I do not know if Midas’s Earth

had a watcher, but there quaked something in the dirt.

The gilded

creatures were rattled to their bones

as a great blossom found bloom

from the bones, but it was not gold.

-

Within the Earth came bones,

from metal dirt did the marrow bloom,

and the gilded nightmare was no longer gold.