Roar of a GM engine, and gust of speeding metal on interstate road, some times I wonder, limitless is the sky, heavy the chains that try and hold me down, but I am young, strong, and heroic. The hero never falls, he only picks himself up and rams his fist into the wind, only God can calm his fury, but his hunger knows no bounds. I am he. Don’t think too much, just drive on through, miles the summer heat, but by my side my woman lays. The scent of feminine perfume and sweet thighs I have climbed. This is the summer of 91. My car, my girl, the road. My last ride before the storm. The final words to be said before the dawn of manhood and all that lays upon that journey.

Love is doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons and living through the consequences that result from it.

I was in a strange place today and thought I’d write something a bit more off beat….

For Love Knows Not You

I walk into this place, alone and morbid, saddened in heart, and perhaps desparate in attention.  The path goes on and stretches wide, but never wide enough, just long and whining down to other corridors, to other places, to stores and counters, to displays and makeup mirrors.  Teenage girls giggle and converse their lives and events.  Children cry and fingerprint the glass windows, their mothers tired faces try to smile and every now and then an impatient father looks at his watch.  This place smells of nothing.  It is clean and disinfected daily, the air conditioning is on, but it is never cold, perhaps too warm at times, filled with such masses, but it always feels close to adequate, like it is artificial.  I look up into the ceiling and see only more glass, no real sun, but there is a light that comes through and I know that this place is a temple.  It grows high and there is space, yet nonetheless it suffocates me.  I feel the endless procession of people back and forth, a constant flow of images, everything new, shiny, and cool.  Paranoid women and lost men, bored children misbehaving, a petri dish that has gone unattended.  We build prisons for ourselves and call them temples.

One of the most bizzare plays I’ve read was Peter Shaffer’s Equus.  It is a remarkable work and one of my favorite plays.  There is a film version, which does manage to do it some justice, but still leaves some things out.  I recently watched the film and one phrase stuck with me and I wrote this to expand on it a little.  Note that Equus is about a boy who is mentally damaged and the doctor who must cure him, even as he himself questions his own sanity.

The Death of a Thousand Gods:

Listen.  I know who you are.  You look upon me, wanting to know me, to touch me.  The feeling is in your head, you want to reach for me, but you are afraid, of the finger tips touching, making it feel too real.  Instead you tie yourself up, naked and staring you want me more now than before.  Your god is dead and and darkened in the beyond, he feels no passion, does not hear the urgency in your prayers.  He has abandoned you to me.  We are alone here in the forest of your dreams.  You are young and only you can hear me in this world.  The sounds and ecstasy of a thousand gods all feeling you at once, showing you truth and holding you both as child and lover.

But from the outer reaches, you hear the other’s voice, telling you that you are in pain and that you need to be cured.  He tells you he will save you from this torment, from my embrace.  You look upon my eyes, innocent you know them, this is love, this is the passion of the gods.  They will not betray you.  Do not feel ashamed of me or where we have been.

You cry, and in your mumblings I know that you have begun to pull away to the other.  And as you do, I see you already on the alter, another soul to be sacrificed to the logic and reasoning of a dead god.  The other will take you upon the stone and carve you open, leaving you hollow and bleeding, without my love you will live and grow old in both storm and clear.  But your soul will be blind and desolate.  Deaf!  Do you know you will be killing a thousand gods as you pull yourself away!  The cross is burning in the distance, the other awaits you there, crying behind his mask.  If I can’t have you, I will take him.  For as he draws you out of this meadow, he will stumble and in his fragile nature, I will know him and he will hear me, the dark pathetic old man that he is.  He will save you and cure your pain, but you will never be a boy again, nor know the voices of a thousand gods.