A song of themself

[Sepia]

The dead were dancing long before we showed up. The dead had comedy acts, upright stand up citizens telling the stories of life and death over glasses of beer. There are no snitches among the dead for the dead have seen what happens, the dead have learned more than the living, the dead know more about life than the living and that's the real kicker because the dead can't tell us what they know, we aren't allowed to drink from the pool of the dead visions. Crossing the line some do, or try to do, trying the old ways, giving away an eye for the knowledge of the world, embedded deep into the sidewalks and bridges, seething in the rivers and the bars but Odins ways don't work anymore. That magic has been exhausted and like Crowleys magic now wanes for magic doesn't follow those rules, magic needs to be created. The potency of magic never belonged to any mainstream.

The dead drift by the houses of those who wished they were, crashing on couches with heated coffee from the microwave, the dirt underneath the nails showing no promise to the junkies of hope, those who needed change for their lives to function but whom never got that change because it was no easy way to get it. They didn't want to be targets, they didn't want to do it like this because there is a law, there are laws at work which govern all we don't see, the laws never govern our actions, no laws have ever governed our actions but they've always governed our words. The belief is that from words comes action and as they believe this we begin to believe it and the holes of our beings are repaired, filled with steelwool so that the rats will never gain access.

Some times they scream at us from the top of their lungs but we do not hear them, we see them and their screams. Black and blue silhouettes against a red pavement but there is no blood, there are no drops needed to be spilled anymore as we walk through these lives that have lived but not let for it's all been shed before, in everyone's names and it never mattered if it was legitimate or not, the old law still govern us

as the old law goes from love under will

to where we are now, in the old days and we're watching gysin/burroughs climb alamut and we can hear them up there on that mesa, screaming for hassan i sabbah in that guttural sound that comes sneaking up when you've taken too many assorted drugs at once and your voice is no longer in your control and you repeat the mantra for while jack the ripper gave birth to this century, gysin/burroughs were ahead in time and delivered the next and they stole their mantra and put it on our fates and souls, lodged it into our backbone so that when we hear it for the first time, something makes sense, we understand the law

we understand that nothing is true, everything is permissable as we also understand that everything is true, nothing is permissable

sit around coffeetables, drinking it black and smoking cigarettes
sit around on barstools, writing codes of conduct on napkins
sit around the parks, feeding pigeons and stepping on the soapboxes when time is here
sit around the tv
sit around the pc
sit around when every soul in the world delivers their state of the union address

this is the law, this is the will as the dead march outside the windows of the living, trying to tear it down, trying to keep the two worlds different, trying to give that last ray of hope to the junkies of change

their ideas are dead and gone, they wish to live in utopia
their hearts are no longer there, staring at us with empty eyes

you see, hope was never our weapon, hope was their weapon if we can call it a weapon, the only thing the junkies have left

is the hope that their life mattered when death comes, that their lives are given value by their deaths, not for themselves


but for those who saw them

[Golden Applesauce]

Thank you.

[Cramulus]

That was breathtaking, Sepia. I really enjoyed that. That piece is making a good run at being one of the best things you've posted here.

[Kai]

I hear silence.