Sit, sit and be still. Douse that ragged brain in cold water. let it sting until you settle, finally awake.
The preacher stands waiting at the gate. Is he coming or going, hearing or telling? With your finger raised to test the wind, you find a right you must defend.
That sound? That is the sound, of something loading in the background. Ominously it grows, stealing strength from shadows that hide its development. This is how we roll, it tells us… piece by piece, little by little, with every small unnoticeable gain building on its predecessors, under our ken and over our radar, like the onset of sleep, profound but certain.
The preacher is not pointing. he is leaning in the wind, bent by the rain, tortured by doubt, left to be strange. And if he is allowed to relax in forgiving climates, then he preaches no more.
This sound? This is the noise that your mind makes when it puts its mind to it. A black effort, a little hummy, not too whinny, maybe a tinny edge to it, do I detect an oakiness rising after the initial sloshing and spit? Maybe it lingers too long on the palate, as the cogs made from historical bones, cleaved from their owners, whirring in unison, scrambling to a bent attention.
With nothing to fight, the soldiers of course, are in no mood to listen. What passion do we need now they say? the front is closed, our job is done, we have been abandoned, we will go home to our wives to never forget. We do not need to be passionate about the rest of it, we do not need energy to wallow, we do not need fire to freeze.
Such a noise, a roaring clatter and the smell of cooked meat. Standing grinning in the centre he holds the stick above his head, mad eejit, t-shirt and shorts, eyes wide open, a lucky lunatic waiting for the right moment to strike. Such a racket, the unwholesome thumping and ripping and stuttering explosions, unloading belches of shakery and ruptions. How can he just stand there like that? No, no, he must be deaf.
The preacher must have run out of advice. He spoke until the river ran dry, spoke and spoke and spoke, till his throat became parched and every word had to be pushed out through dessicated stony vessels. It was too dark to see if anyone was still there anyhow, yet he was not convinced. I will not miss it when it happens, was his motto. I have not seen it yet but I am ready to recognise. This is it, this is how it will be. This is how we roll. Your ears need to be filled, not too much, nor too little, they must be regulated and reinforced… but hmmmm I do not know enough, only I am prepared to know too much (Be prepared, pre-repaired, Caveat emptor, and so on and so forth).
Loading, loading, lost. Tired of looking for justification for direction or ambition, stick above his head, and not hearing anymore the voice that once droned away in the background. His arms jolt, the war over, the stick comes down, the sentence splits, the words admit, depart, such as it was and they were, contained in the value of their describing, parading to the full stop, fingerfulls of types and typos, backspace backspace forward forward neurons firing stopping to look back revising deriving stick down crack! edges and empties, forward and back, order and information, borders to hack. Where does all the data go, where does all the data gooooooo0o0o00111010101011011?
Sit, sit and be still. Douse that brain in cold water again. let it wash until you settle, finally awake. let it wash until you settle, hurryup for fuckssake.