Twizzlestix!

The cacophonic calculations of one billion beaming star streams and all the fishy souls therein twisting into flesh and blood and bones amongst the hum and tones of stellar tunes, the looms along the wings of time, and woven weaving in vines and lines of love come creatures of such struggle, smug, and self conceited, hiding from their highest song. These men, the error of a hundred thousand screaming suns, the echoes of some coughing god, who having spat them out as phlegm, negligent, twisted, coiled, and recalcitrant to make it straight; to clean it up; to demonstrate a variation of the spasm of that great goule. Leering query of the quaint and quivering kind, “Eh hem” – politely and too politic, by some Methodistic insistence on contained rage, to call a spade a spade and, nay, a knife a knife; a gun as such. The weeping weapon we all possess and jilt about triangular and awkward toward some inner urge to mate, to make more, to mimic that grand hacking hack above the clouds or hidden in plain view. To these we turn our attention.

We mention first the existential obvious: that they know nothing of their origins. Poems they wrote and cryptic riddles, and some claim mythic knowledge by the whispers of that old pervert they call God. But deep down, they none of them know the past, nor even the past before their born. They say, “It’s thus”, and self convinced they trot about content with nonsense, content with tents that teeter shameful in the winds that come in the quiet, when fate and sorrow pour themselves like oil upon their hands and their hair falls slack about their gaunt faces, and they face the shuddering starkness of their naked minds. They say, “And then”, and cajole and jaunt and jitterbug, and then when the silence they’ve been holding back breaches their silly levies, they flood with nothing and stand agape staring ahead in this hard moment. “Now,” say some, but their now eclipses all the many riddles that they cannot answer, and so they sanctuary in the bitter moment and feign lightness, as do those they touch. No, they know not from where, or how, and they wonder when, and when, and when, and when when comes, they remember then.

Convinced opinions on everything and the weather they pile about them seeking comfort in the comely voices of their peers, but pierce the prose and they are but tinkling symbol, sounding brass, radio static, television snow, and the fickle strength that comes with blown cocaine, the caffeine dream, cannabis seem. All is veiled, and all is vain. We see through a glass darkly, and darkly we stumble, some to stone and some to throne and all unknown. There is no science that can compensate for this wanton ignorance, this tavern cavern wherein we drink of all but truth, and our pleasures are so little, like moths we burn and our powdered flitter adds to the smog. Guess and guess again – a game we play with fire and ice, and, lo, the world doth grind to a halt, and the alternating currents, lunar and solar, polarize, and the caps melt fast in our fervent heat. “Eat, drink, merry make ye!” shrieks the horde of beauty bound idols and their masters sweat and linger on the side, biding time that isn’t theirs. Minding their show business while the sky falls in chemical screens dropped by mindless pilots flying to tomorrow land.

Do not fear the sinister. Fear the brute.  Fear that we are in thrall to the growling maw of ignorance, to our lowest instincts, to those mechanical habits that lurch and drive us, staggering against reason, beauty, and compassion toward the void. No wonder faith and blind dogma, its superstitious bitch, remain the obsession of the masses. It is a candle in the hurricane of our ancient existential crises.