Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Sung

He sits across the room telling me some story of how I will be the hero of the next twenty years, and I know I ought not yell across the room at such an hour, but he should know that not he nor I nor any meaningful person on these ever-rattling, slowly-drifting mountains will ever be a hero to a world empty of the idea. Yet he tells me of the times that I will be able to tear down the great soul of the winter winds for the benefit of no man but misery and serendipity as he laughs at me for overlooking the vernal nights of yesteryear that were full of floating girls and romantic images flashing through my then-shallow ego as I formed into a man who, at the time, I never thought I could be. And he reminds me once more of those wasted summers spent writing scripture and singing and dancing for rain clouds or some shadowy, celestial relief from the long, still nights without much care in the world but the moments in my hands dripping onto the ground. And all the while, he was the bird that landed on my windowsill to tell me that the fall would bring me to the level of a demigod if I chose to grab a hold of the world and tear it apart and build it in his image. And I was going to be a hero of paper, of mind, and of the ending soul that shapes America through the fires of growth and recession. And I couldn't help but always love this lunatic's words and how they told me about the day I would burn through the world straight to the core and find Lucifer waiting for me at the gates of hell because I wasted hundreds and hundreds of days not waiting for inspiration, but watching fast television, slow girls, and the blinding incandescent lights built into the ceiling. And he tells me that he will grab me a hammer and a wrench and a blow torch as soon as they are necessary, and from these tools, I will create the new, beautiful world in the destruction of wrought steel and propane tanks without any solid intention to bring the world to its knees or closer to God. And consequentially, I do not know the reason for a conman like him to demand this of me without expecting it of himself, for he was the man with the direction, the charisma, and the will, and he keeps passing me the information that I am born the sun-god and I am born to bathe the world in the loving-light of future seasons and I am meant to use Salvador's clocks to define how long tomorrow will be. And in twenty years time, he imagines that I will have created the Tower of Babylon out of the lost city of Atlantis, and he keeps telling me the power is sitting right outside the doors downstairs and will be waiting patiently for me to enter the lost days of the twenty-first century as a carpenter with the atomic bomb strapped to my back. And he will not allow me to be a heretic to my divinity, but I can only half-believe in the man screaming from a fringe of a stone-floored room about times I know nothing of.