Caustic. Chapter One (Draft)

0.1 BORN DEAD

I was born dead. Doctors would’ve preferred to use euphemistic terms like stillborn or DOA. But those epithets would’ve apposited the arrival of my festering flesh about as aptly as asbestos swaddling would have been suited to smother and abort a supposedly newborn savior. That’s not to sound sacrilegious. It’s simply a way to underscore the severity of my traumatic introduction into this wicked world.

My neonate cadaver was exhumed from the womb/tomb of my mother’s corpse as a mere formality at Mezhgorye’s local military hospital. She’d already been summarily assessed as DOA herself, and by the time doctors had performed a c-sectioning excavation of my unresponsive carcass, it wasn’t even alive enough to warrant wiping off before placing it back atop her rueful remains like some bundle of befouled and wilted funeral-flowers. However, they had seen fit to drape a burial blanket over our gruesome gurney before wheeling it all down to the hospital’s dungeon-morgue.

There was no interest or impetus to necessitate an autopsy either. So, our familial filth was directly discarded like a dead man’s losing hand and discretely filed back into the deck of a neatly numbered cryo-cold cabinet. We were meant to await administrative approvals for the water-cremation (aka resomation) of our quickly freezing remains in accordance with those neoteric Kuru mandates that had just been made in response to an emerging outbreak which would later come to constitute an apocalyptic epidemic in ways which I will chronicle in due time. But by some morose miracle, the mortuary’s mutinous employees had decided not to fulfill all their official duties before having left early that night.

Then, some hours after having been interred in that infernal freezer, the sordid sounds of infant-screams had suddenly and inexplicably erupted from my cryo-crypt. An anonymous janitor had been mopping up nearby with loose earbuds blaring away until she’d inadvertently shaken one out of her left ear and heard my horrid cries echoing down the desolate hallways like demonic tremors rippling through accursed airs. A cold chill had shot up her spine and she’d crossed herself before fleeing in frigid fear. She’d kept praying and screaming in stupefied syllables, intensely imploring her glorious god to help her find someone valorous enough to vanquish my horrible hollers from her unconsolable ears while her feet had slipped and slid all over the soaking wet floor, sending her heaping mass continuously crashing into everything around her.

This jumbled janitor had managed to make it as far as the foot of the elevator before she’d finally fainted at the sight of its doors yawning open to deliver the hospital’s blood-soaked Commander directly into this confounded catabasis. The Commander had remained frozen like a motionless monument of maternal mourning, holding her own blanketed heap of lifeless flesh in her emaciated embrace as she’d stared through sorrow-saturated eyes at the confused chaos of the collapsed custodian. A long and mummified moment festered before her muted mind could make any sense of what her normally brilliant blue eyes were seeing. She’d been well known as an incredibly discerning and decisive leader, but the tragedy she’d just endured had effectively eviscerated and emptied out every thinking and feeling part of her.

A mere moment before she’d entered that morgue-bound elevator, the Commander had suffered her own most mournful miscarriage. After having been informed of her infant’s instant and inconceivable fate, she’d stubbornly insisted on delivering her devastating bundle of stillborn sorrows to the hospital’s morgue by herself. She’d somehow hoped that this desperate act would’ve afforded her stillborn’s soul at least one, singular, loving embrace before its indelicately mandated immolation.

That’s why the sight of this collapsed custodian could barely even register behind her sorrow-soaked eyes which were still desperately drowning in an ongoing deluge of delirium and despair. And just as the Commander’s eyes and mind had adjusted themselves enough to properly perceive this sordid scene, a subtle snippet of sound had softly swept against her unsuspecting ears as my recently reincarnated cadaver had managed to reanimate its mouth around yet another inarticulately agonized annunciation.

My cryo-afflicted cadence had already become quite dull- decaying and diminishing exponentially as I’d weakly waged an already waning war against death’s cold and tightly clenching clutches around my critically hypothermic cadaver. My ever-weakening whimpers wafted through the hindering hallway like a faint and fading fog, drifting just far enough to haunt the edge of the epidermis around Commander’s ears. And though they were not robust enough to enter her higher mind as intelligible sounds, my tremulous tones were somehow able to speak directly into the soul of her skin, commanding it to shrivel and shudder in a sudden plague of pallor as my morose message was miraculously manifested in the subdermal layers of her instinctual skin.

Her mouth autonomously grimaced with an impossibly greater grief than she’d already been afflicted, and she’d gasped at the abominable epiphany her skin had indeed just absorbed and encrypted in the blood that rushed to flood her mind. She’d swiftly and instinctively snatched up the elevator’s phone with an automated motion and kicked one of her reflexing feet forward to trip the safety-sensor, keeping the elevator’s un-dinging doors from slinking shut.

As she’d waited with frozen ire for the hospital’s gauche, gargoyle-like guard to awaken and end his derelict delays to answer her call, the insane imagery of this collapsed cleaning-lady had become clear enough to elicit a slight sense of active annoyance, as she’d noticed that this fainted face had failed to comply with the nascent mask-mandates.

At the death of the dial tone, her almost pre-recorded voice didn’t waste any time waiting for the guard to wake his tongue. She’d promptly interrupted his pre-syllable silence and ordered him through her own minutely muffled m-95 mask to dispatch a doctor directly to that dungeon. She’d proceeded to somewhat shakily step out of the elevator and check the janitor’s jugular to find a faint pulse. Then she’d inexplicably reached into her pocket with one hand to procure an extra mask and carefully place it over the custodian’s face while clinging quaveringly to her limp bundle with her other arm’s unwavering love.

The Commander’s feet had foolishly fought against the frictionless floor, attempting to scootch the custodian’s hindering heap against one side of the hallway. She’d soon realized the futility of this fight and made an impromptu decision to swing her smooth-soled feet over this human hurdle. But when her soles had surmounted that inanimate encumbrance and landed on the other side, she’d instantly swirled and slid atop the mop-slickened floor.

Her balance barely remained upright as streams of spasmic maneuvers toggled her between flailing footsteps and skittering surf-slides. Without ever fully recovering a favorable footing, she’d desperately surged toward my morgue-based moans. She’d barely managed to avoid bashing her own burdening bundle of stillborn sorrows against the bland beige walls as she’d continuously teetered on the edge of a constant collapse, perpetually postponing a planting fall with unconsciously controlled contortions. When she did finally find her way to the morgue’s derelict door, her bundle had somehow remained safely buried in her immortally enduring embrace.

Her infant-free hand had flailed to find the doorknob and she’d tried to lean on it enough to steady her feet as she’d grasped ahold of it. But the door had been left carelessly unlatched, forcing her to sling it violently inward against the wall as she’d stumbled into the morgue, and finally unfolded herself upright enough to find her first stable footing there. This intolerable infraction of the unsecured door had stoked a stinging sense of outrage in her. But she’d refused to think of anything more than where my now almost imperceptible infant-sighs might still be summoning her suffering skin.

She’d slung cryo-cabinets outward wildly, leaving them open when nothing more than frail and frozen fatalities slid out to stare lifelessly back into her bulging blue eyes. When she’d finally traced down that icy slab from which my sparse and subtle squalls still just barely seeped, she’d almost skipped ahead to the next cryo-cabinet, as my susurrus murmurs had fallen mute and my incessant stirring had become frozen stiff at the sudden shock of her hand ripping back the burial blanket to reveal my blue and bloodied baby’s body.

She’d been forced to place her own stillborn bundle right next to my own barely undead cadaver, resting it atop that same aborted abode upon which I’d recently been interred. Then she’d raised me from that macabre burial mound and baptized me in the morgue’s sordid sink where so much blood had been scrubbed and drained away by those now absent hands which had habitually held death as its casually disgusted couriers. The freshly flowing water had slowly absolved my forsaken infant skin of that bitter-most cold and the brittle crystalline blood which had half-petrified my bones like fossils trapped within my near-fatally afflicted flesh.

The Commander’s own emotional state had instantaneously become numbly frozen by my filth-frosted flesh when she’d first hoisted me into her hands. She’d been utterly dumbfounded at the impossibly icy chill of my frozen infant skin and the even more chilling silence of my black but blinking eyes which stared straight back into her soul. I’d sustained my disquieting calm even as vital signs so slowly seeped back into my slothfully thawing skin. According to her later accounts, those cryo-cold cries I’d proffered in the penultimate moment to her most admirable arrival and rescue of my inconceivably cold cadaver had been the only occasion she’d ever witnessed me announcing my own agonies.

But then, why should I? What could ever be decried aloud by any soul that had been so silenced by death, before being resurrected back into any realm of blood and breath, however horrid? And in a world which echoes nearly every cry to and from an endless audience of unhearing ears, what use is there in bleating such babble into any breath anyway?

I must admit that this terrible tale of my befuddled birth was never told to me by anyone alive. But I eventually inherited the truth of this tale in sealed confessions and relayed professions of those that could not allow these facts to fester inside their fading and formerly conspiratorial corpses. It would become incumbent upon me to piece the total truth together, yet certain details do remain unresolved even now.

One such indeterminate detail has to do with the shared fate of the janitor, security guard, and doctor that were all called to respond to my morose miscarriage. They were all officially designated as deceased on this same sordid night. The janitor’s cause of death had been denoted as complications due to cardiac arrest. Presumably, she’d had a slew of preexisting conditions that’d made my haunting cries too horrific for her ailing heart to handle. Either that, or her lack of mask-compliance had surrendered her to a rare and rapidly progressing strain of Kuru.

Strangely, the security guard had reportedly responded to that dungeon with his revolver drawn and his finger at the ready. He’d accidentally discharged a round directly into the doctor’s defenseless skull as he’d stumbled out of the elevator and onto that insanely slippery floor. Then, this disturbed guard had indiscernibly decided to drag both the dead doctor and unresponsive janitor down the hallway to that door on the outer edge of the morgue.

The Commander had heard the guard’s gunshot erupt and echo some redundant number of recursive returns into her ringing ears. She’d instinctively rushed to lock the morgue’s door while letting water continue washing over my still thawing skin and she’d returned just as promptly to ensure my salvation. By then the filth had been rinsed away from my flesh quite cleanly, and she’d swiftly shut off the faucet to silence any sound from seeping into that haunting hallway and surrendering our presence to any unseen predatory threat.

Her hands had patted my pallid and shivering skin dry with paper towels. Then she’d secured me against her own skin and blanketed me in her still maternally bloodstained blouse. She’d placed her lips at the entrance to my ear and softly prayed an arbitrary shush into it. I’d remained almost ominously hushed and buried within her embrace as the dragging sounds of the disgraced guard approached and ceased at the very edge of the dividing doorway.

The Commander tightly stuffed my eyes against her skin and squeezed my ears in a burying embrace, trying to muffle my infant senses from what was about to ensue. The gauche guard moaned several times in inarticulate despair before he’d yawped his equivocally incoherent, final valedictions unto either the Commander or some equally unresponsive god. And upon uttering his last languished laments, he’d sent another violent gunshot’s shockwaves throbbing through the door.

A tense and trembling moment held like the dead hands of a broken clock. The Commander waited for the silence to surrender a sense of static safety before extending an un-cradling hand to slowly switch the lock soundlessly open. She’d surgically severed a slowly spreading sliver from the doorframe so her eye could steal a glance. On the floor outside, she could see blood hemorrhaging from the guard’s head and flooding down that heap of bodies beneath him. She’d carefully avoided disturbing any of the evidence left in the wake of this inexplicable mess and crept back to the elevator’s phone to ring the appropriate authorities, which in this case was quite the opposite of the police.

Of course, the official records of this wreckage all had to be made and mended as carefully as any mortal wound to protect the hospital, the Commander, myself, and even the befuddled bodies in the basement. The Commander had to ensure that all official records corresponded to the proper conclusions and not necessarily the ones I’ve already illustrated thus far. However, an unreliable source would later claim that these three departed souls had actually been exterminated to eliminate any administrative complications at the conspiratorial behest of the Commander herself. But I can neither objectively attest to any veracity within this claim nor honestly admonish it in full. Thus, I’ve reluctantly resolved to include this inconclusive and personally inconceivable accusation as an offering of transparency unto truth.

What is quite clear is that the Commander had confidently concluded at some point that neither my mother’s DOA corpse nor my own excavated cadaver had any claims to any form of a father. According to the Commander’s later accounts, this had caused her immense distress at the time, as she’d known all too well that this fact would’ve prevented anyone from adopting me outright. At that time, all orphans without directly surviving ancestry were required by law to be placed into public custodianships. And she’d known firsthand what atrocities awaited all those souls that were shunted into such sinister agencies of child services.

So the Commander waved her powerful pen over the pertinent paperwork like a magic wand to mend my name and cleanse her soul of an unbearable, extended, maternal morning. She became my mother of record, and her own miscarriage was forged into an effigy of my own undone extinction. I was given a name I shall never give you, as it never truly belonged to me enough to rightly offer anyone. And as for this saint that saved me as no other miraculous mother ever known, I shall protect the sanctity of even her sobriquets and strictly refer to her here with great reverence as my Mother of Record.

Make no mistake. I have no claim on her, no misgivings, no malign. She’d made a pure-hearted claim upon me, but I still have no right within my own mind to call her mine. As magnificent of a mother as she always was to me, and as I still remember her to be, I’ve never felt as if I were a proper son or person. And it would be an unbearable blasphemy to even insinuate otherwise.

Before I’d assembled all these facts about my entry into existence, my Mother of Record had always refrained from detailing anything about my origins. She would only occasionally answer any questions of my father’s identity by subtlety insinuating something to the effect that he was not with us and would not likely be present at any future point in my existence. There was a certain woundedness in her voice whenever she’d professed this truth, and I’d always assumed that my father had either died tragically or despicably departed before my birth. Even after all I’ve gathered, this is the truth I still choose to hold above any conflation of facts.

Ultimately, these details of my birth are largely irrelevant and have only become distressing to me now that they’ve been foisted upon me in the aftermath of so much else. Although, I must admit that I’ve long suspected that some part of me may have never been allowed to properly form due to the lack of some nutritional truth which my soul had been deprived of at some point in my development. The omission of my origin’s full disclosure is obviously one potential proof of such a suspicion. However, I still wonder if my soul was disfigured in some other manner during its development, as even after having considered all these notions, I still feel a sense that my spirit had been further flawed in the way of a flower long deprived of certain nutrients or a tree whose growth was greatly stunted by tightly shunted roots.

Although, even if my spirit had been starved or scarred through this confused conception of mine or any other confounding chaos, I would really be no different from every other entity that was ever born upon this earth. I mean, who in this horrid hell has ever formed any identity on their own that hasn’t festered in falsehoods and insufficiencies? And don’t we all suffer from an immense if not infinite confusion as to what role the forces of fate impose on us through the infectious nature of this malnourishing and maliciously deceitful world which tells us who we are and what we must become at every inciting, instigating, or impelling turn, even before our very inception?

Of course, it’s my contention that the invisible essence of these things that manipulate and mangle our souls into confused and contrived misconceptions of what we truly are, can in fact be understood and explained. However, I must take care to ensure that the light I intend to transfuse into your awareness and understanding is allowed to seep into your sentience slowly rather than blinding your mind with blunt bursts of explicit explanations. So, forgive me for refraining from further stating my epiphanies at this early onset.

Anyway, I believe I’d merely mentioned the fact that I’d been born during the early days of that now infamous Kuru epidemic somewhere before my last digression. This epidemic had motivated the Globally Organized Republics’ Executive Directorate (GORED) to enact a series of emergency mandates. One of them had required all newborn babies to be isolated in incubation chambers until it could be ensured that they were not already infected or at any increased risk of becoming infected with Kuru. This meant that I had to be kept in almost complete isolation for no less than the first full year of my existence.

This mandate was so strictly enforced that it had caused me to be transferred almost directly from that cryo-cold crypt into an isolated incubator, like a corpse transplanted from one secluded casket and into another. From my lifeless entry into this wayward world and throughout much of my lonesome endurance, I was forced to struggle within some shell or cell just to exist. Although, my own incubator was not such a restrictive place when compared to those protective tombs so many of my so-called peers were shunted into at that same time.

My incubator had been specially equipped at the behest of my Mother of Record and with assistance from the Odarenny Operatsiya, aka the OO or Double-O. They’d been conducting classified research on the optimization of infant aptitudes at that same time, and my Mother of Record had been selected to peer-review many of their studies. She’d already known both the powerful potential of this project and the devastating developmental damage likely to ensue as an alternative result of the maligned mandates on isolated incubation. And there was no way she would ever leave me so alone to cry unto the unhearing ears of oblivion like so many other infants of that time.

So, my incubation chamber was well-appointed with auditory and visual apparatuses that allowed special programing and educational content to stimulate and shape my budding brain. At times I was blindfolded with hi-fi headphones secured to my ears which piped in binaural beats, kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and meditative voiceovers which spoke to me in multiple languages. These assorted sounds were specifically calibrated and orchestrated to organize my emerging mind like an auditory mold around the biological assembly-ooze of my materializing mind. Essentially, these sounds functioned in the same way as pre-hypnosis techniques which had been further designed to scientifically stimulate developing brain cells, optimize intelligence, and promote cognitive coherence.

The existing research had already pretty much concluded that these auditory efforts could ensure the development of higher IQs, perfect pitch, and an increased aptitude for creativity. They’d also shown significant statistical correlations for increased synesthetic associations in many of the subjects exposed to these visual and sonic structures. It had been strongly hypothesized that by exposing infants to a progression of deliberately controlled stimuli which were arranged in orders of clearly logical progression and coherently increasing complexity, the infants could effectively be pre-programmed into having an increased aptitude for complex pattern recognition and a more generally well-organized coherence of thought.

In any case, I was sent to soak in my special incubation chamber with such strangely calibrated sounds while the whole outside world was kept as far away from me as slumber from an insomniac. My reality began as a series of carefully constructed dream-prompts which guided my mind along a predetermined and optimized path while my budding brain was glued together like some sort of popsicle-stick kingdom of conscripted meditative consciousness.

The sounds of seascape waves, windswept skies, and the cacophonous creatures of some generic jungle were the only natural world I was allowed to know. Their order was ordained to me with hypnopaedic precision, so that there was no doubt in my developing mind that the true chaos of nature was no more than a misunderstood complexity which was incumbent upon me to master and organize in accordance with some stronger sense of lucidity.

I may have learned more in my first year of formulated lessons than most minds could manage to make sense of in their first few decades. In conjunction with these auditory prescriptions my ears had absorbed, I was made to witness an endless stream of visual presentations which effectively injected correlating content into my eyes. My ability to perceive the most miniscule color variances was refined beyond the typical range of trichromats through these vividly defined visuals, and my eyes’ perceptual acuity developed into the upper extents of testable tetrachromacy. I was also programmed to apply this trained-in talent to master and memorize things like the periodic table of elements, the various classification levels of biological organisms, and the geological eons, eras, and epochs of our earth’s stone-layered history.

My mind was so hyper-stimulated by such an endless stream of information that it was as if entire encyclopedias of knowledge were constantly being injected directly into a series of ever-deepening aquifers of intel beneath the soils of my sentience. Before my mouth could even manage most words, I could instinctively spell almost any word in no less than eight unspoken languages. I could balance complex chemical equations in my head, and I could imagine myself humming or whistling along to entire classical compositions from an extensive cannon of notable musical masters. By the time the Kuru mandates were finally modified to allow me access to reality, I may have even accumulated more factual knowledge of the world than many acclaimed academics.

Additionally, my limbs were wired into an array of apparatuses which helped me develop gross, complex, and refined motor skills and reflexes. This taught my body how to move and balance long before I was given enough space to test my actual ability to walk on my own or explore the outside earth. Such coordinated motions were also installed into my incipient muscular memory before I’d developed much of an independent will to initiate them or establish much dominion over them. This was akin to granting my limbs a mind of their own and an incredible autonomy of motion, like an appetite originating in the mouth and commanding the jaw to bite before a mind can even become aware of the act, much less consider the nature of such cravings.

I was also kept on a carefully formulated diet which had been proven to increase muscular development, build strong bones, and promote overall physical health as well. All these things were intended to contribute to the creation of an optimized specimen in which to house whatever human spirit I could bring to haunt or inhabit it. Essentially, I was scientifically designed to be everything humanity aspires to be.

I don’t say this to brag, even if my Mother of Record found every opportunity to do so on my behalf, especially before she was allowed to interact with me without a divisional layer of glass between us. In fact, I tell you of my training and subsequent sentience as much more of a cautionary concern. You see, when I was eventually evicted from my incubation chamber and cast out into this wicked world, it was perhaps even more chaotic and tragic than my initial inception into that cryo-cold cadaver-cabinet could have ever been.

I’d had no real-life experience or exposure within my blood to flow between my pre-programmed mind and the inherent chaos of the world which slithered against my no-longer-secluded skin. Everything that had happened after my extended incubation was experienced as an incomprehensible trauma for more years than I can accurately attest, as I wasn’t even able to sense it all as such. My knowledge of the world was so much more advanced than the actual state of the world, that I’d found myself stumbling through life as if my head were stuck in some second-rate augmented reality helmet that refused to release me from its demented death-grip.

And that’s not to mention all those continuing conditions of the Double O’s other educational experiments conducted on me throughout my young years. Nor is it to convey the impossibility of slumber it all induced on me as a result of this hyper-hypnotic over-simulation. But of course, I will explain all of that in due time.

After the Eschaton...

Shadows swing where kids once lived before the eschaton. The darkness reigns where light is now unbroken by bodies turned to ash and dust. The winds no longer roar against the ears that never listened to their warnings anyway. Radiation mocks the sun that rises without witness here beyond the days now lost. 

The dust can't care about the space between the dust to dust or ashes to ashes where men once lived now that hands have left their garves unetched forever. The cockroach struts where shoes can't stomp him. Sewers turn to ponds and streams where creatures with dual heads open their third and fourth eyes to behold a beauty lost since Eden. Confusion has no host to lie in egotistical denials of its existence where the proud are shamed unto the same extinction as the humble dead. 

This is where the first chapter of another tale begins. The story now forgets of man and all his loss. It knows no joys or sorrows of his departed mind. His dreams sleep only in the minds of those who will not wake upon this plane. Here the life remains as prey and predator without gods to ask or answer for the blood they shed nor swallow. Intelligence is in the jaws and claws that conquer every cleverness the skull cannot command to slash or bite more aptly than some other.

This is the world that always was without the world man thought would be and imagined as if it truly was. Here is what our kind betrayed while betraying itself and so much else, but what remains as true as always to all things. Nature never cared for man, but never feigned to either, even as men sought to change it, tame it, or transcend it. 

The game goes on, unplayed. The war rages on, unwaged. The silence waits without a word to say. The nights and days go on unmarked and unmeasured by clocks whose hands point to numerals as nonsense and quotas whose tallies all sumed unto nothing all along.

What other end could there have been and what is it that begins beyond? The question is not asked. The answer is inherited by oblivion. And that is all there ever was to be now that our kind is not to be...

Precursor (From Pending Project "Caustic")...

See the light these words reveal. It is this bioluminal miracle of linguistic ink and bloodshed-essence which must be reimbued into our human remains if our extinction is to even be endured. Fate and fools have left us little more than ashes and epitaphs to sift through for whatever wanted wisdom may be left as our only inheritance, entombed outside this necromantic tome. These words must become more than symbols stamped on skin and tell more than the tales of those villainous Vory-varlets whose skin was stripped and shrove to produce these printed pages. In these words, there shines such great truths and essences of ecstasies which were always destined to seep into the deepest depths of every flesh that finds them. Nothing else is left to save the sanctity of our humanity, now that so few of us are left to scavenge these barren badlands for some post-apocalyptic antidote. God how I pray these words do not wither away in vain!

These pages are indeed of bodies broken for you. Here within this luminous ink lies also an amended amount of blood which was shed for you. Receive this written sacrament of still-living truths, despite those desecrated vessels which were so thoroughly purged to be proffered as embodied pieces of purifying prayers for you. Offer unto this tome only the godly grace to serve the sacred spirit of those truths that shall shine throughout this telling tale. Use these enlightened lessons to guide your hands to tend to greater gardens than these graveyard ruins which now grow only a malevolence bereft of mercy. Grant unto this auteur only the forgiving faithfulness his God would so gladly give you for understanding those imperatives that have made it incumbent upon his suffering spirit to employ such macabre materials, as they shall prove to be as vital here as blood and breath have forever been to sustain both skin and spirit. Have faith, above all else, that the human spirit shall in turn be redeemed and resurrected within you when the totality of this tome is absorbed and understood.

Any soul in doubt of the devoutness of these auguries and avowals is welcome to ask the defiled dust and abject ashes to argue well against these words. Some sordid spirits may yet seek to slither through this tome as scheming servants to that sinister serpent that sneers and scowls at every tongue he’s yet to twist and tangle against the truth as he mangles every mindless mouth that belches words that blunder breath. Hallowed be those souls instead, who heed these triumphant teachings and stand tall against such tainted and twisted tongues. Exhume those venerable vestiges of our storied species from even those corrupted crypts of skin that contaminate and trap those souls which yet yearn to be purged pure and live anew. Sacralize your only souls down to their craven cores by soaking in the light these words are soon to show your eyes.

Now that this prefacing prayer has been proffered, allow me to indulge in illuminating a few elusive insights and asides that had evaded many extensive efforts to excavate through eons of oblivion. Offering them in advance of our telling tale, may well ensure a fuller harvest of those fruitful truths which shine of a subtler splendor than those more brightly lumined by this same self-enhaloed ink. Without elaborating on them so explicitly here, it is also feared that these truths would soon be lost to every mind and memory for untold eons or eternities, beyond even the lifespan of the light lavished on these pelted parchment-pages.

First, allow me to expound upon a few misconceptions of mortality and death. It is commonly assumed that life either endures until the final failures of breath, blood, and brain or subsists eternally in realms unto which the soul is released or restrained upon our earthly expiration. This is not entirely inaccurate, but it invites irrationalities into certain interpretations through the invisible voids it omits in its incomplete insinuations.

The unpleasant truth of death is that it does not come crashing at the final clang of some brackish bell’s cataclysmic toll, but seeps slowly into our souls as it spreads throughout our bodies and brains. Our very essence is dissolved and drained away from within us as we clutch and cling to our undead cadavers like shriveling larval chrysalises dangling from a disemboweled carcass whose very stench has long ceased to linger there.

Repugnant as this truth may be, we must understand that our lives are not merely the length of time we wilt and wither, and our dying can be more debased and detestable than death itself. If we are to tend to any life at all now, we must accept that life is not just an opposite or opposition to death, but death is instead that part of life in which we return our remnants to nourish whatever is to be reborn and resurrected from our sacral soil. Surrendering our skin and soul to fertilize a future is not a sacrifice at all, but a way to keep the light of our essence from festering until there is no skin nor soil left to tend it well. Existence now demands that we do not waste-away too long while all that lives within us turns into necrotic tumors that will grant our graves so little to reclaim.

All these aspects of death and decay have already wrought their wrath on much of our material world as well as those immaterial realms of art. So many artforms have followed and fallen from the very same arc in which they had: emerged from other decaying artforms to evolve and redefine themselves alone, risen to a pronounced artistic peak in which the aspirations of their form became critically complete, redundantly re-replicated in diluted and reduced potency while their failing form was increasingly left to fester in standardized stagnation, and then finally self-mimetically mocked their own farcical final-state until nothing was left to resurrect beyond some necrotic nutrients which another unborn art must absorb by way of necromantic acts if they are to emerge from them anew…

Forgive me if I appear myopic of mortality or exultant toward death, as that is not my true intent. I’m merely fledgling to find a way to convey the necessity of balancing the imbalanced chemical equations this earth has long been enslaved to suffer in an attempt to restore the law of return and bring life back from this brutal brink. Revitalizing life is in fact the sole reason I’ve chosen to compose this admittedly, terrifyingly constructed tome. Every choice, including the choice to turn to the long dead art of writing has been made for this solitary reason, and I must apologize if such reasoning remains unclear.

I do hope that I’ve planted some seed of understanding in your mind that may blossom more fully in time, but then, we must have patience for this to occur. For now, it is sufficient for you to understand that this conception of death is an essential element involved in the civilizational necromancy I’ve aimed to achieve by writing this tome. However, I’m certain that sanity would leave you uncertain as to just how this necromancy should work, and how writing, of all things, could in any way achieve this end.

Most sane minds have long recognized that writing has long been dead. But this is where I must remind you that death is not some brackish bell that tolls eternal damnation. In fact, writing has always been more of an undead art, one that neither lives on its own nor dissolves itself completely down to any final death. Writing may also be considered a stillborn art-form, preserved forever in some strangely suspended animation, always waiting to imbue itself within some other illuminated soul or skin.

You need only read any given title of grandeur and question its vitality to confirm this superficial fact. How many great novels have been written by those who’d wasted away in depression and decay rather than acting in any accordance to the truths of life they’d espoused? How many tomes consisted of the same truths that had been dredged out of other esteemed and entombed tomes, only to be transplanted like fossils into a festering pile of lifeless pages? How many readers dwindled away in disinterest or distraction without ever having read a word which resurrected any truth within them until they became an emptied and extinct species?

In my own era, I’ve read countless tomes that have come to little more than elegies and eulogies for things now blanketed by an infinite abyss of time and ashen obsolescence. I could unearth for you any number of tomes that read as if their words were smeared by unskilled hands that wielded pens like amputated appendages, aimed blindly by a broken compass to allow an unseen arrow to arrive at nothing more than an arbitrary dead-end. There are mass-graves of pages which appear to have been comprised of dry-rotted dead-skin stripped by some maniacal mortician who’d misused a makeshift tattoo gun to sketch senseless gibberish over them while trembling under the spell of some terrible, Kuru-induced seizure.

But this tome is not to be misconstrued as any such abhorrent attempt at an artistic expression, nor any confused confession, nor any other mangled malady or machination. These words are solely meant to exploit the essence of what words truly are, and dissolve the truth down to its living core, so it may indeed be resurrected. And make no mistake, the true essence of words is completely corrosive.

Words are a most miraculously caustic pseudo-substance that can dissolve and cleanse both the immaterial and material world. A mere insult can cause fissures to split through one’s mind and summon a hand to slice along the course of arteries and spill blood into oceans of dissolving sorrow. The right words can corrode through entire mansions of stone-clad lies that have long held firm against every other eroding effort to reveal those hidden truths that had been tortured and enslaved in the vile dungeons beneath them. There are yet words which can cleanse the corruption of eons and return civilizations from their contemptible collapse. And words may even be coaxed to breathe new life into the most broken breaths or preserve the sacred sarcophagi of those spirits which must yet wait to be redeemed and reincarnated. But words can also corrode away even their own rhetoric, along with all they aim to purify or restore.

Of course, all that shall ever be written will itself become an eroded epitaph at the eschatonal end. Until then, words will only cast the shadow-spells of history- that pervasively Pavlovian lore of what words perpetually resuscitated and reincarnated as iterative egregores of all we’ve only imagined of existence. And every present moment and every impending future are rooted in that same sullied soil of those ever-corroding repetitions of words that dissolve or imbue us with repurposed pasts that nourishingly restore us and re-decompose what eternally emerges.

But while there are still sets of eyes which survive along with these words, there is reason to believe that this tome may yet shine in a way that resurrects what shadows would swell to swallow if it were to become too dim within us. Words are precisely the proper nourishment to refresh our inmost spirits. For when one reads, the mind consumes the essences of words in ways which fuel the soul to reimagine and reincarnate life from the cadaverous shells of such scripted symbols.

When one sees some still image, contrarily, one may merely observe and interpret what spawned such a sight and what intention might remain veiled beyond the expanse and acuity of one’s eyes alone. Moreover, when one merely watches a movie or film, they surrender all their soul and senses unto that story and its scenes, so that everything is consumed by zombified eyes devoid of any imaginative awe or essence of their own interiority.

So let these words provoke the sprouting of your rejuvenated spirit. But let there also be the greatest warning. For this is not a tale of cliché comforts and encouragements. It is in fact quite a caustic and cautionary commentary. This tome is primarily concerned with those insidious and almost invisible aspects of existence which plague us all in ways that only the most intelligent and insightful minds can ever hope to bring into focus by devoutly directing a savant-like acuity and a monastic degree of monomaniacal diligence over the entirety of their own existence. Only by bringing this darkness to light can the brighter truths, which have long been held in such secretive slavery, be released and returned to the deprived and desolate soils of our truth-starved souls.

Of course, this is where my warning becomes as dire as any death. For it is within these same shadows where truth’s light has been forsaken that stygian kingdoms are built by those darkest demons which all eyes are rightly scared to see. If the nourishing light had not been so long forsaken, it would not have fallen so far into these sinister shadow-abysms and would not need to be so fearfully retrieved. For demons dwell where eyes so easily become blinded by both the subtlest sunken light and all that lurks as spirits dressed in smirking skins of shadow.

But now eyes have little choice but to be bold as they read and resurrect the fallen light, as those stygian kingdoms have now risen to enshroud nearly all the earth. And demons do dwell all around us here. And all our souls have been plunged into the catastrophic catacombs of our spiritual catabasis. And while demons do not seek to be seen, they thrive where eyes turn themselves away, gouge themselves out in sinister sacrifices to stay unseeing, or become deceived and distracted by demonic illusions and false illuminations.

That is what we all must fear when we look to save the light from such stygian shadows. Do not read these words as if they were projected thinly on some entertaining slide-show’s surface. Do not merely interpret them as if they were smears of pigment upon a decaying canvas. And do not imagine them without concern and concentration on the essence of the light they’re meant to resurrect and re-create. These words must not consume you or simply be consumed. They must become illumined in the soils of your soul and serve to restore your spirit’s lapsed, perennial shine.

Of course, all these words will have all begun as mine alone. They will have first been filtered through my own unique mind, focused on what I’ve considered to be the most relevant and definitive truths as I’d experienced them directly through the course of my own storied lifetime. But let us pray to whatever divinity might be capable of granting us wisdom, whether such an entity or force exists as more than an imagined egregore. May these words not be condemned in sole service to my own over-shadowed spirit, like the stink of a corpse confined to itself in the empty catacombs of eternity. May you not merely follow them like a map that marches you into the embrace of my same still empty, final grave. Or in the words etched over the arches of my current catacomb-abode which pray and prey upon my self-illumined eyes, words whose essence is to be echoed and inscribed unto your own imagining gaze, as yet unseen but still unblinking here…

“Let no one follow in these footsteps, lest they become their own.”

…But Where Am I Right Now?

Put the past behind me

Keep the memories in tow

One foot then the other

Keep moving, however slow

Sun forever rising, falling

Surrounding everywhere we go

Know the “why”, abide any “how”

Eyes on where I’m going

… but where am I right now?

Climb a ladder of causation

Each rung’s a concentration

of ascending through ascension

Look on up or right back down

The smile above the lower frown

Look left, right, all around

See bright abyss above and ever-distant ground

… but where am I right now?

Mirror, asking questions still?

Make me ponder my own will?

Pour my heart, for what to fill?

Count the days from none to nil?

Before the dawn and after dusk

The planted seed and wilted husk

The harvest growing what it must

Between the ashes and the dust

Curtain rise and final bow

With no crowd to bore or wow

… but where am I right now?

Just Focus On Your Breath...

 Find a place where you can be alone,

A place where silence and darkness preside over this earthly oblivion,

And then place your body in a comfortable position,

Allowing your body to arrange itself around your breath,

Effortlessly accommodating the flow of emptiness as it fills and flees you.

Now deliberately draw a deep breath, all the way in,

Holding it for one full, but fleeting moment,

And then allow the air to exile itself from your desire to draw & hold it.

Don’t think about how easily the emptiness of the world fills you,

How it floods the void within the depths of your very soul,

Or how it absconds and abandons you no sooner than you can welcome it.

Don’t worry about the intensity of this omnipresent oblivion,

How its vastness only seems to expand with every breath you take in,

As if your lungs were not swelling with each inhalation of air,

But perpetually collapsing both inward and outward on this perpetual void,

Becoming all the more empty by this void's ouroborosian abandonment and indifference to you,

While you forever gasp for but never quite grasp ahold of all that both is and isn’t there.

Don’t do any of that right now. Just focus on your breath…

Now take another intentional breath in, 

Noticing how your body adjusts itself without effort,

Accommodating the air as it acquiesces into an autonomous alignment,

As if the abyss itself were obliviously molding and commanding all things without any consent.

Go ahead and breathe out now, exhausting this abstract air out with any existential anxiety,

Letting the implications of your breath’s subtle, simple subversions of will pass along,

Permitting its lethargic circumventions of your every conscious intention.

Don’t worry yourself with any delusions of free will whatsoever now,

As this constant invalidation by the reality of breath negates it.

Don’t let your mind fester on impotent attempts to empower itself,

Or its futile efforts to imbue itself with illusions of any false fullness.

Let the essence of existence flow from nothing to oblivion instead now,

And quite simply allow yourself to just focus on your breath…

Allow your lungs to guide your breath on their own now,

Noticing how easy it is when you let go of your false sense of control.

Pay attention to how freeing it is to simply notice your breath,

Just being present as all things conduct themselves,

Animated by this perpetual flow of invisible air.

Don’t worry if your mind wafts in and out of random thoughts now,

As if it were still trying to subvert the will you thought you’d released.

That’s just your mind’s own misguided way of mimicking breath,

Altering between inflated awareness and depleted oblivion.

Allow your consciousness to drift along with your breath.

Allow what you cannot see or understand to fill you.

Allow your breath to give life to your lungs.

Allow thoughts to bring wonder to your mind.

Allow the abyss to numbly tug upon your very soul.

There is no need to struggle or hope for anything more than this.

Hope is just gasping for a breath which may never waft into your lungs.

Letting go of hope is allowing yourself to breathe each moment as it comes.

Don’t worry about the fact that the world will cough you out of it all too soon.

Of course, your life is just an incidental breath in the scope of existence,

A spasm or hiccup it experiences with little notice or concern for.

That shouldn’t worry you anymore than your own breath,

Although, it’s possible that the world is more aware of you than that,

And perhaps it’s as focused on you and your life as you are of all these things,

As if the thoughts that waft along your breath were a microcosm of all life,

And your own focus on your breath may mirror the world’s focus on you.

But perhaps you shouldn’t pay any attention to all of that right now,

Perhaps it would be better for you and the whole world to relax,

To let the world worry about the world as you breathe, in & out,

And just focus on your breath…

KostKoLandious...

I met a shopper from an American land

who said, one vast membership club

is right off the interstate. Strewn about its lot

countless carts & hoarder-scooters are on hand

Near them in the store, half drunk, a vested greeter cries

whose bloated waist, gaping mouth, and useless hands

tell that well upon these products fed

whose nutritional facts remain, stamped on these sordid things

the 100 gallon ice cream drum, & the rucksack of insulin

to keep them from dropping dead

And on the labels, these words appear

"The manufacturer assumes no liability,

for any diseases derived from things in here.

Our prices for these things are more than fair."

No produce section remains, 'round the decay

of this KostKo. mess. Lost in vacant stares,

the lines from listless checkers stretch far away...

I Don't Know What We're Doing Here...

I see people incessantly pointing cellphones

at themselves & the world

like vicarious, outsourced eyes

I hear people perpetually proselytizing

about how some politician, app, or cryptocurrency is the only ideal

with voices that all sound like someone else's in disguise

I smell an ever-surrounding smog of cities and fuel

forever burning their secret, essential scent of existential fear

I tase too much sugar, salt, and altered chemicals with alphabet-long names

in every omnipresent, faux-food thing, bringing death so much more near

I feel no love extend beyond the flesh or reach to touch in ways

which know more than mindless fingers 

that swipe calloused across some screen

I don't know what we're doing here, 

I'm not sure what we mean,

but this can't be It

I look for the divine

but see only spectacles

performed by false prophets

with horns, furtive or flaunted

I listen for truths

but hear only lies

that fall for themselves

or slither, hissing to "snuggle"

I stop to smell roses

but there's no longer bees

or at least not enough 

to pollenate and provide them

I try to taste pure bliss

but I can't bite onto anything

that hasn't been pummeled into 

a product or content which contains and produces

nothing more than a bad taste in my mouth

I reach to hold onto anything

that's not kept on the other side of some glass,

be it that of some screen or the glass-houses

we've all been confined to & sentenced to throw stones

to break out of or into

I don't know what we're doing here,

but none of this fits

History relentlessly casts a shadow of itself

from forever forgotten eons ago

to eternal futures we only pretend to know

While we all speak of dark times

as if they were foreign lands

which we've tried to exile ourselves out of

since we were yet primordial ooze

or which we quietly counter-conspire against

as invaders intent on our extinction & doom

But the sun, 

it just stares at us

shimmering in silence 

while we dizzy ourselves

to submit & support some 

other source of artificial light

which we aim to illuminate 

an oasis on both sides of our eyes

while it cooks our brains like heat lamps 

left on far too long

And the birds flap their wings exhaustively

to migrate through these schizophrenic seasons

and so many other mammals appear to need no greater reason

than the reasons that guide gliding fish through plastic-pulp oceans

from the unseen depths of their secret abysses

to the heights they can leap to with their fin-winged emotions

I don't know what we're doing here,

but perhaps this is it