Vignettes

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Immortality.

That is the cause that drives all of us; we meat-puppets, bio-piles, self-motivated obsessed carbon life forms that we are. The reason we do everything that we do is because we die. The meaning of life is that it ends.

The scrawled hearts on the park bench, the scratched names under your desk are cries from the past; reaching yearning, calling from that abyss where all things must go. We build cities and businesses, and lives because they are graffiti to the gods, and we want them to be hard to scrub off the walls.

Think about laborers under the beating sun dragging blocks for the great pyramids, think about the lives that were spent to turn great blocks of stone into a massive tomb for the ruler of a sand patch at the end of a muddy river. Thousands and thousands of hours of back breaking work, of lives spent like devalued currency, and for what? So one man could have a glorious tomb and take his riches into the after-life? Yet ten thousand, thousand men and women and children were buried in shallow graves in the sand. No embalming for them, no hope for an afterlife for them.

You think we are any different today? We work and sweat and labor to build high-rises that will be used, and then neglected, and then dilapidated, and then razed. Gone. Cities rise, cities fall, ruins fill the landscape and the flesh-toned tide of humanity rises and falls, ebbs and recoils, fades and though it is always dying, always being born, it is a continuous thread that stretches back into history, one meager life at a time.

Do you really think you are going to make your mark on the world?

Time is death, death is time. Eventually I will be gone, you will be gone, and perhaps if we are fortunate, we may be remembered by our descendants, or if we have done something famous or infamous we may be remembered long into the future, though that future does not really matter much to those still trapped like a fly in amber locked in the past. I look at those scratchings on a park bench, and wonder at our own mortality, the great mystery that is death. What deep scratches are you trying to leave behind?

-EJH

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There is that which can not be understood: a sharply defined realm of the unknown. Our minds touch upon this secret only fleetingly, In moments of self reflection and lucidity, there is only be silence of the soul. When the mind is free from any shadows of fear or lingering nightmare, then and only then can this be explored.

The key turns slowly in the lock.

 

The gate slides open to frigid darkness and vibrant color, pigments of very thought. My heart leaps into my throat choking away the consciousness, with timid, and faltering steps I cross the threshold to enter the silent chamber. Give me a way to capture this essence of life and return it to this world of horror and shame, I shall shiver away the curtain of darkness that enshrouds our world, I will copy the keys and give them to all the gatekeepers with a charge to let all pass who desire entrance. When the last of the mindless shades have passed forever from the torrid darkness and into the color of thought: the gates will be shut fast, the keys all melted down to nothing, and this realm returned to desolation with only myself: a lone sacrifice.

Guarding the void from habitation.

 

-Ezra Hilyer-

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Darkness beneath the trees; twilight falls slowly down to the mossy leaf strewn earth, while I wait hidden between the dark void of the sky, and the sharp eyes of my pursuers, I keep my breath low and patient, my gaze even and wary.

Time crawls across my rifle barrel and drips from my lips. It is the only real currency in this old world, it is the only thing we have to spend. Your time can be wasted away, or given away, bartered away, and taken away.

Movement crests the ridge below, and two men push their shoulders up against the deepening sky, moving silently into view like small black beetles crawling over a branch… They are looking for me.

They have been found.

Crosshairs divide features from darkness, silence from an echoing report. Unspent time… Unspent time.

EJH

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This is my Cuneiform Epitaph.

Scratches on clay the remnants of lives, tiny sparks that winked brightly and then went out; time consuming the present moment by moment, Langoliers following closely behind, watching for scraps and pouncing on wasted time.

When flesh grows cold, and entropy consumes blood, bones, and essence leaving nothing for the dusty shrines in the desert. Perhaps some would-be excavator will unearth or draw up from the bog and weedy rushes some ancient oxygen deprived preserved mystery. Some brine soaked encrusted memory devoid of identity. What sharpened flint points of logic and rhetoric will be discussed in papers of those learned and versed in the unknowable?

As Ötzi mulled over pre-stoic ideals and post-grazing utopias while munching roots and mushrooms, I am hunched before this scrap of plant fibers mashed down, boiled over and pressed out. I grasp my blunt tool and bleed dark Voynician prayers to the Old Ones still hidden in deep cold abysses of time and dark water.

EJH

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