Post by Sleeves on Feb 5, 2014 21:15:30 GMT
The Inhuman Condition
I. BURY THE BONES
I am a husk: raw: rusting: ruined. My mind is a carcass, reverberating with the screams of the void. On the fragile ribs is writ the story of my kingdom come tumbling down.
I am as the land that chains me: a starved and broken body in revolt, disimpassioned eyes like twin black holes. “Beware of the man,” the choir whispers, “Who would look the abyss in the eye and laugh. Beware of the man who would stand before the stars with nothing but a fire extinguisher to his name.”
Per aspera ad astra.
As you were.
II. EAR TO EAR
Here there are no heroes—only swindlers, donning crowns of thorn and bone. Do you really think you know anything? The board is set for something that only looks like a game. Here love is a commodity and lives are dealt like currency, like pastel-colored monopoly money.
And, O, Sweet-Summer-Child, here’s a funny story for you:
A county lineman and his son of sixteen, drinking too sweet lemonade on the porch, singing of bloodlines and powerlines, and wearing the skins of scholars and sages. “Tell me, Junior, what is there left for you, other than this porch that your grandfather built? Other than these parched lands, with their overworked soil? Other than grease and wires and cables?”
The floorboards rattle and the damask wallpaper peels and the boy, because he is hungry for things he cannot have, because there is everything and nothing but this porch and these lands and those wires and cables, swings from rafters like gallows.
Are you laughing yet?
III. THE WAY DOWN
I speak the language of the tides, of the vast and volatile and boundless depths, of the apathetic waves, which are not knowingly cruel.
“One for sorrow”—well, it is no wonder that I am alone. A man is never just a man. A messiah is never just a messiah. A monster is never just a monster.
Tat ich ab, was kindisch war.
I cut my soul on all of my broken idols. Now I only believe in monsters and in demons and in myself. Somewhere down the line, the distinction between the three becomes blurred.
I fell silent; I fall silently.
IV. WHEN IN ROME
The wheat trembles in the field. The society girls are screaming. The clergyman cannot calm his hands around a cup of tea.
To cigarettes and syringes we turn, for want of a god and deliverance from the ennui. Lies stretch over truth like flesh over bone and flush fingertips trace the chalklines of a star chart, white powder like bone dust collecting under our nails.
From this bruised cadaver of a city, hollowed by hubris, our case is plead to the Moirai.
What is the human condition? Is it Death, a blunt instrument to be capitalized and exploited? Is it Pestilence, something systemic and ever present? Or is it War, waged and organized and controlled?
The answer is always: has always been: all of it.
V. PANDORA’S BOX
Can you taste it on the bone dry autumn breeze? Can you taste the growing Hell?
L'épidémie qui s'étend.
Can you smell the burning Pneuma? The flames scoff as they devour our effigies and treatise and pyres (oh my). We burn too hot and cut too soon, unleashed like the dogs of war. We denounce the stagnation and , white-knuckled, cast aside the crimson-stained wool.
Cannonfire sets the tempo to our song:
Ashes! Ashes!
Hush! Hush! Hush!
We’ve all fallen down.
Our lungs fill with gunsmoke, our minds with absinthe. Tonight we come alive, not in darkness or in solitude, but in fire and in blood. In the rocking of a car rooftop, our stage, and in the light of a Molotov cocktail, our votive.
Here there is nothing to lose; the Nothing can’t be lost.
VI. IN THE WAKE OF GODS
And what is there left for me, other than the splatter of blood against a police shield? Other than the roaring of the maddened crowd? Other than the internet set ablaze and the heads of the Borgias dangling from the parapets?
I flinch from the fracture, from the raised scar flesh, unfeeling save for tender, throbbing edges that define the emptiness between. Reality shivers. My fingerprints stain its surface, my fantasies cling like cobwebs to its frayed ends.
For I have entered this world as I shall leave it—howling, like the wind through empty space.
I'm kind of a fan of reader interpretation, so tell me what you think this piece is about. I wrote it with something in mind, just so you know that I didn't string words together on a whim.
