Out Of Sequence Poem by Patti Masterman

It must have sucked to be a Pompeian psychic
Back in Vesuvius youthful, fiery days; or in Herculaneum:
Flashes of some blackened, ash-filled Armageddon
Always intruding, in even the happiest of circumstance.
Curious, frozen statues, in tortured stances
Always blinking on and off in the background,
Like some hellish, neon warning.
Trying to do a reading for the client,
While tormented by a vision of their hollowed, lifeless shell
Angled towards the horizon, propped on their elbows, even in death.
The whole place; a ghost of it's own past, and future sterility:
The prophets should have been
On the first bus or donkey out.
Instead they are piled up down there with the bodies
At the harbor's edge; all their unspoken predictions
Having made perfect sense, at the end.
Who knew the mountain was a hungry predator
That would stop at nothing, to engulf their
Charming, sophisticated world,
Thus saving it for the future generations:
A snapshot incredulously out of sequential times domain.