Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Writing Exercise: Seeing.

Moderation. When we die our shoes will be cast into the fire and convereted to ash so our dead ancestors can talk about iron snakes, stone rivers, and spider webs covering the Earth. All the while the dead will shout to kill and be killed again. All the while the cornerstones of our tradition (one is a meteor) will be bowled at the wickets of respectable discourse. All the while the dead grin like escaped mental patients cutting out the dead tongues of those they understand. All the while the dead scream "I believe you." All the while the dead flock to Angkor Wat trampling each other until until their blood forms a river that has its revenge on New Orleans, whose people will scream "Pontchartrain was right" as they seethe and twitch in blind flooding agony. All the while the dead say that Faulkner was wrong in predicting a levantine sentence structure that reminds us of the red nights on darkened urban streets in paranoia-inflicted garbage disposals. All the while the dead insist they're alive. All the while the dead ruin every Halloween and New Year's for all of us. All the while the dead married quintroons on gospel plantations and screamed pitiously for the chemical effects of alcohol on the brain to be widely released to the public, for the public was dumb and dreamed of high school football and remaining seventeen forever; they read our minds and they discovered our desire to fuck underaged virgins forever and ever the same way that religious fundamentalists still do in the far reaches of that greatly ignored democratic choice called a monarchy, one that we disregard as fantasy all the while we teach our children to dream of Barbie the princess and Ken the prince who will someday ascend to be king in some non-existant land where monarchs are somehow gallant and lead the troops into battle screaming "for kingdom! for kingdom!" and bravely slaughter the infidels. All the while the dead form the division of European history into three traditional ages (one being the dark ages where religion stopped us from researching medicine) because the natives were turned red as punishment for not believing in Jesus. All the while the dead refused to declare the loves of their lives the third temple, screaming from Mount Sinai that God is our one love, screaming from the Ka'aba that God is the greatest, screaming from pre-colonial Ontario that God is in the trees and the sand and the rivers of stone and the spider webs that cover the land, and then wondered why the modern man has a fear of commitment. All the while the dead filibustered misleading arabesques from divisional apertures and societal oubliettes and then wondered why modern man cannot speak for modern virtue. All the while the dead tap us on the shoulder and remind us that each dead man or woman is someone's dead mother or father and then Freud informs us that we will become our parents. All the while the dead inform us that boys do not cry and women are supposed to be strong as if weakness meant men will not love women and women will not love men because the barbarian Goths will invade our Roman villages and wax maraudic and devastate our crops, salting and burning, emitting nonstop swear words as they desecrate our temples, fuck our young boys, convert our religious leaders by force, wail screams of tortured conquests from Mount Sinai and deny our messiah his righteous coming. All the while the dead tell us the messiah is a man. All the while the dead remind us the messiah is not a fairy tale. All the while the dead remind us to be fearful of technology, of sexual freedom, of the future, of modern music, of making friends with those of other faiths, of contradicting our religious texts, of criticizing Islam, of boys crying, of not listening to our elders, of cheering for the Expos, of not praying enough, of not believing enough, of daring to believe that that our dead remind us to be fearful of technology, of sexual freedom, of the future, of modern music, of making friends with those of other faiths, of contradicting our religious texts, of criticizing Islam, of boys crying, of not listening to our elders, of cheering for the Expos, of not praying enough, of not believing enough. All the while our dead remind to take our shoes off when we come indoors, to keep our shoes on when we die.

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