Alien Ruins
…awakening on two feet, in a daze, torched beneath a white sun, dragging my feet across alien sands, rattled, dizzy, but I can walk forward—and begin the process of going back.
I have my arms and legs, thin beneath my black suit, chalked-white from chthonic terraforming, powdered in the byproduct of unholy chemical reaction, the sum of all human endeavor—absolute death, summoning a lunar underworld right here on earth.
I wander the man-made desolation, newly formed, a wasteland fit for our shadow world, caught beneath the thumb of the Archon, that dark master of this reality, petty tyrant, a slovenly oligarch who hides in the dark, gripping, wet with desperation, slug-like, salted, the leash of his pig-boy son—meanwhile his daughters, fun house-mirror reflections of the Furies, misshapen forgeries, judge hourly in a chorus of wicked laughter.
Step by step I penetrate the walls of an invisible labyrinth, hands dry and cracked, by instinct always turning left, far from the comforting shade of the red-cedars and live oaks, the weeping willows and crooked black locust trees, twilight where the jimsonweed grows, a bit of the devil’s trumpet sprinkled into the reefer, for good measure and a bad time, a little bitches brew for what’s-his-name and Lady Macbeth, ain’t I a you-know-what, rolling up in a field with cousins and old friends, preparing for the rites of a new cycle, smearing the sacred vessels and utensils with blood of the poor fawn, although soon to be made whole in death—
I see no other person, no animal, not a living thing, not a single, solitary soul, merely the dust of ravaging un-miracles, deployed remotely, by cowards, radiating particles of Erebus, personification of darkness itself, head singing I am strange, I am stronger than hate, reminding me of times I bowed at footstools—all around, a gray cloud, choking life it does not contain itself, particles of dust, skin, bone, the flesh itself, once men, women, children—now, dust.
It slowly returns. Nearby, an outcropping of brick, slanted and jagged but formed along a straight line, mounded in talus at the foot of some abandoned construction, little fallen brick men, a sturdy cavalry befallen by forces of deconstruction, ended violently, serving valiantly but falling nonetheless, like the men of Wecta, Witta, Wihtgils. Beyond the smoke, red clumps peek through gray like a cobwebbed chokecherry bush, and I know this will be the first thing that I will remember, when recollecting in the future. This is a point in a line that extends three-way, possibly four, up to eleven but never past twelve—pictura, les yeux de l’âme, drowned in a cloud of flesh. rock, asbestos, dehydrating and tightening the skin bone-dry, like that of the Anglo in the Nefud, blue-eyed Aurens, or blue-eyed Peter, a reality of images—better yet, a hyperreality of projections, spun through light like a speed freak, left airless, suffocating, a haze of many things distorting any line of sight between me and another living thing.
Speaking of—carrion, immediately buried in the subtext, forgotten now for later, identity better left a mystery, filed away in the Unconscious, left of body but right of brain, master betrayed by his lesser half, that rational tyrant, gathering with others of its ilk in order to impose systems, grids, points—all unnatural, thanks to the heathens, the Founders, that gentry of man-made aristocrats, whitewashed by the Spectacle.
Machines fly overhead, Valkyries in carbon fiber, no life of their own, only capable of taking life, precious life—as if I could say the word enough to undo the destruction in whose wake I drift. Everything in the sky is now a fiction. Helpless and yet not hopeless, for whatever reason, insanity? I stay tethered to this world of, well, you know, by, of all things, yes, life, and it all runs on love, endless, boundless, eternally renewable, the reverse-gravity of floating mid-heaven, catching yourself at the apex, the point at which you’d normally begin your descent, the ritual of the long come-down, except this time, somehow, someway, you find yourself continuing to levitate, losing yourself in someone else’s thoughts—I am no stranger.
But I can hear nothing. I’m struggling at the bottom of an ocean, summoning every step against gravity, forward, pinned to the bottom of this world, a prisoner serving time in the dominion of Niörǒr, praying for salvation or deliverance, lost in the white beard of Kronos, a dust cloud, a simulacra Saturni, orbiting an endless cycle of violence, not wet but dry as a brick of clay, unadorned by desert lilies or yucca, but plenty of “ghosts in the graveyard” so to speak, not to mention elsewhere, yes, floating, passing through three-dimensional space, a mere shadow…
I stop walking.The dust settles. In the distance, silhouetted like a rain cloud, by our blood-orange star (there is no god of light in this country)— the outline of a megalithic structure, an outcropping of black stone, sharp edges like the scales of the feathered Serpent, breaking the surface if only to remind of some ancient truth, Dis Manibus, only the body dies in death, not the good souls of our buried dead, faces shifting underfoot, shaping the earth itself, receded back into the Field. But a death nonetheless.
It’s the jagged monolith, far away, having settled its place in the horizon eons ago, that reminds me of exactly where I am—this rubble, barren, desolate, death-gray and obsolete, stamped out, this desert for machines, this wasteland, this hell was just my home.