Glass Jungle

	The shattering windows sent mirrored strands of glass into my flesh.  The sparkling luminescence of a single sliver slid easily into my eye, tearing the retina.  With a resonant pop, the sticky tears flowed down my cheeks to the cracked line of my lips, mixing with fresh blood and powdered teeth to gag me like bile.  Smoke floated through my stricken vision, an apparition of fading existence curling through my bleeding nostrils.  Explosive fumes crawled away on silent legs into the holes in the wall searching their way into the desolate sky above.
	Gasping for breath, I feared that I wasn't going to see my reflection in the mirror again.  Darkness filled one eye like an inky could, and the blood was beginning to brittly dry upon my lips and cling to the remnants of my beard.  My face was scarred by radiation and sunburn, and blisters were beginning to bubble to the surface, tickling my adam's apple.
	The fatigues hang from my legs like sinewy kite tails.  Months of caked dirt and my steaming innards soak my once proud uniform.  You get used to the filth of the war; it grows on you through the cracks in your sanity, prying and ripping at the foundation of your mind like a diseased, wilted tree.  The jets' screaming pounds into your skull and each flash of horror becomes less bright in your darkened eyes.  Hammering explosions and ravaged children are nothing more than postcard snapshots.
	Outside, bloated bodies rot away in the sun.  Baking on the torn pavement, they swell and ripen like melons.  The smell of soil and decay is covered by the wiry smell of my own blood.  I can see the ones outside, their dead eyes scanning the sky, the sun casting tiny highlights upon their glazed pupils: spots of light on deadened mirrors.  It didn't matter to me.  Like the stale sweat on my shirt and the mud between my toes, the death and rot had become second in my mind to my own dizziness.
	I couldn't feel my legs; gravity seemed to pull too heavily upon my flesh.  I wondered, as I tried vainly to move my head from its cushion of rubble, how long it would take for my body to decompose into this shredded stone floor.  Insects were scuttling over me, tiny legs clicking as they picked at my flesh, bringing pinpoints of life to my deadened limbs.  Yet I was thinking of balloons.  Bright, colorful balloons drifting over the flak covered sky.
	My eye rolled resentfully in its socket.  Silently, it revolted against death as the rest of my body decomposed.  Death had been a long time coming, I had slowly begun sinking into the ground as a layer of dust covered my bloodied face, eager to lay claim to the only right granted to the living.