The Lights Flickering, Vichy Detroit

The lights flickered again and we laughed about it. I wondered if they were flickering up the street at the house. The kids wouldn’t notice in the unabashed chaotic joy of a sitter.

Our kids were, for the most part, unaware of the war or the occupation. Of course, they seemed more aware of it than the majority of the grown folk sitting round us. The lights flickered again but Badu didn’t skip a beat. Another high end restaurant, a facade, built on a failing infrastructure. Flooded basements.

For me, a great deal of it can be traced back to Horselover Fat. While my contemporaries were jacking off to Ayn Rand, I was reading VALIS and running needles through my flesh to feel something, anything.

The Empire Never Ended.

Fat, through divine chance and laser beams began to see Roman facades superimposed on Southern California streets. For me it’s Vichy France, fascist occupation, that I see strewn out through the city of Detroit. The strategic expansion of Vichy shops, Vichy restaurants, and the shutting off of water to Black women and children. Buckets to the river.

My wife’s eyes were lit up, she was glowing, the wine coming on as we talked. Only special occasions would bring us to a place like this in times like these. I was attentive to her but also tuned into the energetic and aethyric flow. Gazing throughout the room I thought I saw a Robber Barron, one of the wealthy Nazi collaborators at the bar. The lights flickered again. I glanced at my wife and laughed, looked back and he was gone.

© EschatonLife

This piece is included in Eden Bloom Eschaton Life

August 5, 2019April 9, 2023

A Clarificational

Manifesto read roughly, falling into sleep, waking to more blood. As usual, this isn’t a confessional, it’s a clarificational, clarity to combat manifestos.

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing here, I mean, I don’t and I do.

I’m not getting older I’m getting thinner,
stretched out on the horizon before and behind.

There is intent and there are side effects, they blur together as they move into the distance.

Spiraling out in a paradigm shift, I’ve destroyed the servitors made to bring me out and protect me.

I do not have the resources to get out and, as discipline demands I’ve burned all the bridges behind me.

I am a rock, an island landlocked and no manner of song, spell or poem will unbind.

I’m not getting older I’m getting thinner, stretched out on the horizon before and behind.

I now have passengers in my care, marked like me 23, that I’ve landed here at the end, toward what end?

I can’t find the combination of gestures, the code or the gods-damned door to get us out of the way.

I have erected the corners in line with the stars that I still know how to find. I light the fires on what I think are the right nights, and I wait, and they grow.

Then there is that matter of time, it’s not speeding up, it’s lengthening.

I’m not getting older I’m getting thinner, stretched out on the horizon before and behind.

Then there is the awareness, while I am an island to the human race, I expand in other realms beyond my kind, my eyes.

The wild dogs, the hawks, rats and the bacteria puddled in the street, Oh! the land and Oh! the dead, they talk to me.

©EschatonLife

This piece is included in Eden Bloom Eschaton Life

July 28, 2019April 9, 2023

Blood Money

Don’t worry old fam, I’m not coming to the funeral. I’m not looking for a payday and won’t be coming round to collect a dime.

I’ve spent my life trying to do it without your blood money, struggling so I wouldn’t be in further debt to the man who brought me into this world and tried to take me out.

This will be the 3rd inheritance paycheck I’ve not cashed or avoided. I’m sure they’ll start a scholarship in my name, I mean his name, or something like that instead.

July 24, 2019November 10, 2022

Every morning I wake before dawn

Every morning I wake before dawn to brush away the demons and angels that have accumulated through the night, the ones that follow in my wake, my albatross, my mutated cross.

Broken oaths, bad blood, blood bonds and divine protections, wanted and unwanted, some intentional, some still unseen, but all felt daily, and not only by me.

So in darkness or twilight, without malice, but maybe with a slight post-penance regret, I sweep out the cobwebs and push them back at bey and clear the way for the coming day.

Even so and as I do, they’ll regroup and re-approach while waging their battle over my soul and my deeds, one side bound to protect, another sworn on blood to destroy.

And they do, and though I sway with the battle, these days I’m able to maintain and wake early in the morning, clear out the dead and those hiding.

Say the words, draw the signs, make the gestures the ghosts and the land taught me and clear the way for another day in this contested space, this place where the river turns.