Wanderer, heart broked

I wander the world now,
though home is still here,
it is a mirror, showing me the things that are not mine anymore
I wander the world now,
unwilling to stop, to speak of what
the mirror showed me, when I crossed through
I wander the world now,
no sustenance,
little joy
I wander the world now,
Alone when I cry at graves for men long dead, long lost
I hated my children
I hated my wife
I hated them for happy silences, and joyful noise
I wander the world now, heart broked.
Will I die before I get penance for the life I lost?
That’s what they hope for.
Orange killed me, even before I wandered
One day, maybe I’ll be ok,
but wandering helps.

Bauble

Hold here, this round, warm thing

it glistens in the candlelight

an apple fresh from the tree, 

a bauble, rolling in the sun

it speaks of life, fair and true

souls captured in a glass

Hold here, this fascinating trinket, 

See pale gleam, moonlight’s visage

Hold here, this wonderful ornament

Adorning your face no more.  

Things Unbroken

Do not give me things unbroken
Things without place, or time, or name
Do not give me things unhistoried,
Things without story, or sadness.
Give me things which speak of lives,
Of hearts traversed, jars filled with sound.
Do not give me things unbroken
For I cannot see them, they are not real
My eyes are damaged, new born is blind
Give me things I can hold onto,
Through craven night, storm swept and cold
Give me things which have bled red blood
Do not give me things unbroken.
Give me something real.

Revelations

“Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days; be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life”
Dec 31st, 2012.
Dear You,
So I guess I should write some of this down, even if nobody ever gets to read it, I still feel like I should leave some record of the things I’ve seen and the things that have happened in the last few days. I know it’s not really likely that there will even be someone to read it, but maybe in a million years, some archeologist will discover it and know the truth about what happened to us.
The thing that gets me is that before the last week, there were signs everywhere that something was coming, but we all called the few people who believed crazy, conspiracy nuts, delusional psychos. After all, nothing really all that bad had ever happened to the global civilization in our memories, no matter how many doom and gloom predictions there had been, they were all wrong. Like that guy, Harold Camping. Said the Rapture was going to happen in 2011, and the worst thing that happened was a bunch of hoaxers leaving clothes around all over the place, like they’d been raptured up to heaven.
The thing that we hadn’t really comprehended, I guess, in our arrogance, was that just because something has not happened yet, doesn’t mean it will never happen. Just because the farmer feeds a chicken every day of it’s life, so the chicken thinks it’s his friend, doesn’t mean that he’s not going to chop the chicken’s head off when it’s time.
Silly us. Of course, no matter how bad the predictions were, I don’t think anyone really saw this coming. Not what would happen, and how.
The crazies and the paranoids especially had talked a lot about December 21st, 2012, but in truth, it started a while before that. 2012 had been a strange year all around really, what with record temperatures around the globe for the umpteenth year running, Hurricane Sandy giving New York and New Jersey a nice bath, escalating tensions running around the middle east, Syria cutting off their internet and loading up weapons, Israel and Palestine at it again, etc. etc. So much stuff happening that most people just seemed to bury their heads and ignore the noise. What could you do, really? Shop shop shop! Vote in the psuedelections?
The first domino to fall though, that was something weird, nobody saw coming, and to be honest it seemed like nobody even really noticed. Branislav Milinkovic, Serbian ambassador to NATO, in the middle of a conversation with some delegates in an airport parking garage, walked calmly up to a barrier, climbed over, and jumped to his death before the people he was talking to could even react. They were shocked, confused, and every one of them said that before he jumped, he’d seemed perfectly normal.
The conspiracy sites had speculated of course, talked about how there must have been something shady going on, maybe the other delegates killed him, maybe someone used mind control on him and someone had inadvertently said the suicide trigger word, maybe maybe maybe. Mainstream media though, if they covered it at all, just called it tragic, said there’d be no further investigation.
Looking back now, though, you could see it had been the first real sign. Branislav had just wanted to get in ahead of the rush, I guess. Didn’t want the hassle of seeing the world just fall apart.
See, the thing that nobody had ever really pointed out about the whole apocalypse thing, was that one day is a really short period of time to have everything stop, to have the world fall apart. Just because the Mayan Calendar was going to roll over another digit, like some mega millions jackpot, didn’t mean any of us were going to win on that day, specifically.
So, yeah, the first domino, Branislav, that was Dec 5th. The second one happened a week later, on 12/12/12. Tons of people were planning to party that day, last repetitive date any of us would ever see, most likely. The second domino, though, that was a little more extreme than the first. At 12:12pm, the Earth started to rebel. I guess she’d gotten tired of drilling, and fracking, and everything we’d done to her in the last century or so. First of all, just a few minor quakes, here and there around the fault lines of the world. Some books falling off a shelf, maybe, grandma’s favorite shepherdess figuring getting broken. Nothing to write home about. But then the big ones hit. Mag 10 quakes starting with Turkey, and moving around every major fault line, with Tsunamis to match. Never heard of a mag 10, right? See, the thing is, the earthquake scale is exponential, with every number not being just one degree worse, but like, 10, or 100, or 1000 times worse. Nobody had ever needed a 10 before. The few news broadcasts unaffected said that scientists had called it unprecedented, completely beyond what any of their models had ever predicted.
Like I said before, just because it hadn’t ever happened, didn’t mean it couldn’t. Some places just got washed off the map, seemed like. Cuba was just gone. Drowned and pounded for hours by earthquake and tsunami, there wasn’t enough left to even really identify where it had been. Just a sandbar and some floating wreckage in the ocean.
The U.S got off lightly, comparatively. About a third of the country was gone, straight up from the gulf of Mexico. Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, just big saltwater lakes, and giant holes in the ground. The rest of the planet suffered similarly. It was like Mother Earth thought she needed a facelift, and instead of just a quick botox shot here and there, she tore off her whole face. They said the death toll was around 2 Billion, worldwide.
Couldn’t get much worse, right? Almost a third of the world population gone in a day? Wrong. That was just the start of it. Obviously, every economy worldwide just collapsed. Nobody was going to work, except those hero types like firefighters and soldiers, and even then, some of them had realized that the only thing they could do would be to rescue their own families, take care of their own. Still, the selfless types did their best to save as many as they could.
Every hospital was full to bursting, too, trying to save those they could. But that’s where the third domino really got going. It wasn’t even one thing, not one worst fear, it was all of them. Drug resistant TB. MRSA, Ebola, Avian Flu. The big ones. The stuff that we no longer had the resources to cope with. The news (playing on every station you could find) just said to stay home, avoid people. Too late though, so many more people died that they just had military driving garbage trucks around to pick up the dead bodies, at least, some places. Some were just written off as beyond help. That all started happening around the 21st, the original Doom-day.
The last domino, though. That happened yesterday. I’d managed to stay relatively safe. Michigan was one of the areas that hadn’t been hit too hard by the mega-quakes, and the cold weather already kept so many people indoors, that the plagues had a hard time spreading. We had it good, at least, compared to a lot of the rest of the world. Greece had completely collapsed, would probably never recover, along with a lot of the rest of Europe, and the Middle East had basically decided that now was a great time to get on with their blowing each other up agendas, maybe thinking that there were just fewer people to stop them eradicating each other completely, I don’t know.
But for us,the US seemed at least likely to recover eventually, even if the landscape was different, and a lot of the people were gone, well, we had that pioneer spirit, right?
That’s when the last domino fell. Turns out, some of those people with journalism degrees actually understood that journalism wasn’t just reporting what was happening, even though there was a lot of it. Some of them understood that journalism meant finding out the truth behind everything. And they did.
Every channel remaining, TV, radio, the few sites you could still get to on the internet sometimes, all of them, at noon on Dec 30th, broadcast the same message. It was a reporter, one of those you see in the background on some news shows, not a personality or any big name. But he’d discovered, he said, that the world governments had known what was coming. Had known about the Mega-quakes in advance. They’d been warned by seismologists, who’d seen the writing on the wall, so to speak. They’d known because of minor tremors and patterns, and sophisticated computer models. They’d known because they’d been told that the frakking they’d been allowing all over the planet, it had destabilized the tectonic plates in just the wrong way. And they’d known, because ultimately they’d caused it. They’d set off a chain of nukes, on the fault lines east of Madagascar, in the hopes of relieving the tension globally, by removing a chunk of one tectonic plate. No matter how many people, scientists included, who’d argued against it, argued for stopping the drilling and the frakking and finding alternative energy sources and letting the planet settle, well, the big money-funded politicians had decided that this was the solution they wanted.
This was the final domino. Governments around the world had known what was going to happen, and hadn’t warned people. Hadn’t even said “Hey, maybe you should try and stay home this day because we’re going to play pool with the planet. Half the people on the planet had died already, from the quakes or the pandemics, and the remaining half, well, that was it. We’d had enough. As the reporter had been finishing his story, live on TV, he’d been shot. Blackwater special ops teams had stormed the building he was in, stopped him talking, but not soon enough. We’ve had it, we’ve had enough of other people deciding that their money is worth more than our lives. So I’m writing this, because I want someone, someday, to know what happened to us, and why. We’re going to do it. We’re going to find all the places that the powerful people hid themselves, and exterminate them. I don’t expect to come out of this alive, but then, since when did anyone come out of life alive? Maybe Revelations is right. Maybe the faithful can hold on and receive the crown of life, don’t need to worry about death. The thing is, I know those politicians who read that thought that they were the ones, they were the righteous and the faithful.
We’re going to show them how wrong they were.

Save Yourself

It felt like worming through the birth canal, miles long, twisting and falling through a tunnel that held me tight, then spit me out here. I’m at the bottom, in a garden, I guess. Though it seems a little bare, patches of worn earth showing through the grass, what seem like gigantic dandelions taking over in other areas. As I try to move forward, I’m stopped by brambles, huge thorns dripping what looks like red sap? Do plants have red sap? I push through them, for I can see no other way forward. They hold me, scratch deep, until I am trapped. I cannot move forward, I cannot move back. I turn and squirm, trying to free myself, but there is nothing I can do. I search  my pockets vainly for a knife, a pair of scissors, something I can use to cut my clothing free, hack through the brambles and tangles.

But my pockets, they don’t hold a knife, or a pair of scissors. All they hold is a small, broken, plastic doll. It is missing an arm, the empty socket staring back at me accusingly. This doll, I had her when I was small, I haven’t seen her in a long time though. I don’t know what she means or why she is here with me. Her name was Persephone. As I move her around, I feel the brambles squirming a little. Interesting. I wave her at the nearest tangle, and it shirks away, like water rolling downhill. I try and free myself with Persephone, but as I free an arm or a leg, another becomes trapped again.

What can I do? I move her again, and a thorn touches her leg. It dies completely, but when I try this on another thorn, the dead one grows back.

If Persephone is all I have, I cannot leave her here in order to free myself - I may need her company later. But perhaps I do not need all of her. She is already missing an arm, a leg will not hurt. I pull one free, and touch it to all the brambles. They release me, and die. 

I leave it there, and move forward. A river, raging and swift has appeared before me. Funny, that I did not hear it’s roar before, but here it is. Behind, I cannot go back into the brambles, so I must move forward. The river, too dark and deep to swim, just like the brambles, cannot bear the touch of Persephone. But it surges back, when I pull her out.

Still. She does not need that last arm.

I throw it in.

The river subsides, water gone.

And then, the desert. Heat baking my skin so quickly I feel as though the core of me has molten, turned to lava. Roiling around my insides.

The doll does nothing to the desert, but perhaps I need her to do something to me.

I struggle with my fingers, until I pull out her right eye. Smooth and slick, swallowing it feels almost like swallowing a pill. Almost.

I try not to think about cannibalizing my doll, and it feels like the eye has worked. I don’t feel like I’m melting any more, and the desert is fading to night. Far in the distance, I see a torch, coming toward me.

A man and a wolf slowly appear, the man looking calm and wise, but the wolf snarls at me.

I brandish Persephone at it like a weapon.

“Do you want my doll too?”

“That is a doll no longer. Only one eye and one leg remain. That is a doll no longer, it is just a thing, broken and useless.”

“So? I gave up the parts of it, to get this far”

“But now it is not a doll. It is not the thing it was, because you sacrificed her movement, her action, and her vision, and now she is not”

“It was just a doll. Why won’t you take some part of it, and let me pass?”

“When you sacrifice the things that you are, just to move forward, you have lost the essence of perfection”

“What do you mean?”

“You could have beaten any of the challenges in front of you, without sacrifice, if you wished to try. But you did not, and now there is nowhere further to go, because your soul is empty. Your only choice is to begin again, to rebuild the doll anew. Go.”

As the man and the wolf disappear, and all is blackness, I start to scream.