Light Mass Prayers
Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 9:45 pm
Light Mass Prayers,
by David Williams
I put the gun to my temple and fired, a well of black and cavernous sound, then I found myself looking down at the bed, blood leaking from my head onto the coffee table and some bright on the dark red carpet, as if screaming out. I seemed to be slipping away from the room, down the hall that was strangely strobed in red neon, the furniture in the den shifting apart as if sliding slowly, coming away, then as the door opened the house faded to deep cave walls of barren light, dripping water but no sound from the stalactites and one man’s face coming into the foreground.
He was sneering; his head shaved but hair in patches, gaunt and gray cheeks that seemed to stare more than the eyes.
‘What,’ he said. ‘Did you expect to find an answer?’
1
The rays parted and I stood where I was not standing and was at all points; the windows shifted, a thousand from one, as if some new creature unfolding its wings and the memory of everything began to leak; I saw the strobe again, remembered names and places, dates mixed and intertwined quite wrongly with each then a strong locking and breaking of both, as if I’d no more use or say to what would happen with them; the windows kept streaming, unfolding, and about their edges and wood panes wove blurs of their form, deep smears that trailed as they left, until those trailed pigments and the deep blush of lime wood conjoined together and flowed in one steep clime under a tree branch.
I looked at the tree branch, a long causeway of cobblestone curving from my feet about graves and marble statues between them at intervals, and a long sharp gating keeping it all together, the wind buffeting the flowers as if they were awake and bodies walking and dropping mementos and memories, and I stood there as straight and stiff as the wind and skirted softly the pattern of the rock path until I opened the gate door and walked through the traffic, lights on cars beaming as I passed through; I walked through a wood door then through a wall and was walking by a bridge but not on it, hovering over the water, then saw a tree and other trees shifting down the line in the wind, the wind more awake than ever I had seen in childhood or birth, the gray light of day slanted abrasive and tone-like and left its raw blades longer than I ever imagined, and no one walking on the streets or talking seemed to notice; I came from a treetop to a glass smudged with four-hundred forty-one fingerprints and entered a second story window in a novelty store where there were several brass ornaments, a chest and dusty books on sale in the chest for a dollar and I flowed from the stairs out of the front door, the bell not ringing or door moving.
I flowed from car to car and their lights came on as I did.
The next bridge a river would rush and then stop as if changing snapshots and the lights on a bright bridge to the left symbolized a great flag of white and red and blue, a great square pattern of lights, mostly out, and I moved from over that to a stadium of green seating and came upon a large, white temple that looked as if I’d known it recently; an ambulance pulled into it and a man flat and gray was taken on a stroller into a glass door and disappeared there; more ambulances pulled up and more men and women were rolled inside.
I creased from the lanes of traffic and no one knew as I entered nor did they know as I entered a convenient store. I tried to hold some powder doughnuts in a display but my hands passed through and I began to shriek and scream wildly:
‘FUCK! FUCK! I’M FUCKING DEAD WHY DID I DO THAT. WHY DID YOU DO THAT. WHY,’ and the man at the cashier didn’t look up; I walked through the table and the wall and a car parked in front of the wall and tried to open a door and my hand passed through up to the elbow.
‘FUCK ME. FUCK ME. FUCK ME!’
2
I make various oaths, standing in the wind and grass, feet leaving no imprints. “Dead,” I moan, hardly an echo, lips unable to form words; wind passes through.
I stand there fluttering like a defeated banner and tryst a bit in thought and then begin to think:
Perhaps I will be consigned to nothingness on the real plane of Earth for as long and far as Earth is here, and I will be alone and useless and unthought of and then the world will be eat away at the sun, billions of years, but I will be so insane my thoughts will be gone and I will be as the wind. All spirits are the wind. I am dead, it must be a truth; but as such, let me be eaten away slowly, let me die the truth, the wind; the second death.
The wind pushed; I felt it was the spirits; they are sometimes cold, sometimes bitter and sometimes warm and cloying in pockets but then cold all the same. They are rushing, howling; they are forces ever apparent, always recorded; sometimes harmless, sometimes killing in masses; they eat our words and prayers up and give us life and are death. It was so simple. Is so stark, clear, glaring, profuse. Why did I never know this.
But I digress. I am a condemned scion, a beacon of nothing that will slowly untwine its thought and human form and then be the invisible wind. I will crease and crease until I seem nothing at all and the pain of being unable to live or touch, to only look on, will push me to at first pain but then I will ignore the pain, and then ignore nothing, and then be nothing.
That is the living death. The second death.
The true death.
How long will it take.
3
3,400,000 Years Later
The earth is covered in ice.
I am covered in ice.
I see bodies, stark effigies of bodies, laying in blades of light ever caught in the ice, dull ice and sometimes dirty and filled with cars, with cities, and sometimes with blood and sometimes empty and clean but always like fireflies bodies; with nothing on their mouths or eyes and only dull tapestries of clothes and caught poses.
Poses of last moments, of moments they were living, of moments that were to come and they think are coming, you can see in their eyes: some are in cars, looking over hoods. Some are are sitting in benches and some walking streets and some floating like poppie seeds in the ice as if on wind above the sidewalks, caught like frozen ant farms.
Everywhere they are, like circuits of blood.
Everywhere.
I am caught. I am but the stone facts of this existence.
Where are the others. Where are the others.
I ask that until I think I see storms in my mind and clarities as sharp as lightning.
I ask that until I think God will come down and reveal the force behind the long drawn planning of my thought process.
And nothing comes. Nothing comes.
Nothing comes.
I think back to the one person, the last one.
4
3,476,000 Years Later
There is a ship landing in the ice.
The ice is mostly gone.
There are people coming out of the ships.
The wind is crisp and sharp and chorusing a welcome.
I hear their voices, the voices of ghosts, in water.
I hear them every day, in every way, on our shoulders.
I hear the people leaving the ships.
Building the world again, the sidewalks coming.
And the buildings rising, at first low short stories on sidewalks and dull brick and dull dirt road and then the paving comes and monuments and names I’ve never seen before are spoken.
300 years later light caves in one me; there is a saw cutting ice; there are men excavating bodies from ice.
I am not one of the bodies.
But I am set free.
When the ice finally sees light there is a great heave and gasp of air and vapor and oxidation; I am among that.
They are cutting now, painstakingly chipping away around frozen hands and eyes and legs and trousers caught in clarity.
They chip and chip, echoing.
5
Did I choose to be caught forever?
I don’t think much, there’s no question or answer.
I move against among new cities.
I move again and the people look the same.
I feel the sweet air and the tang of the sun and the bodies again as I pass through them like cars, every inch of them as if some saintly fiber.
The atoms are rushing like trillions of schools of fish.
The breath of a quadrillion men are in every breath every two seconds. I breathed Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Hitler and every serial killer has been in my lungs.
The cities look different.
They are impossible to describe. I feel like a revelation prophet given words to give meaning onto something that my vocabulary cannot encompass, but there is no angel or vision to give it truth or searing quality: I would, like John the Divine call them ridged serpents with heads of lions and seven dragons and teeth of great beasts and horns, but I’d be describing helicopters, gas, poison, buildings, exploding missiles.
In my ageless tongue I am useless to meet it.
In time the cities rise like flowers to the sun: they are stalks of metal, ridged and strangely warped and deformed with clear, crystalline bubbles on their top catching sun; grass grows inside; millions of people move in each one; cities inside.
They are arranged together in endless row, dotting the land.
The clouds move over the planet and I wish to leave it.
I watched a bit longer.
6
56,059,555 Years Later
The continent of Africa is crashed against Europe.
There is no Mediterranean.
Only Mediterranean mountains.
There are no glass cities.
There are no humans. Continents of grass.
There is no sign a city ever existed.
Only ridges and valleys, endless sun.
7
An ape is collecting coconuts from fir trees.
He is like no ape I have ever seen. His face is smart and the eyes attentive, very soft but hairy everywhere else; its legs and tail are long and always moving, very smart, and it swings about and in the night they all make a long chorus with the insects.
The apes sometimes meet and clean each others’ fur. There is a fight suddenly, a new group of apes raiding the open glade, and they take sticks and stones and smash the ones cleaning the fur and eat the bodies of the men, women, and children.
They hoot and holler with the insects.
Eventually they build a city.
Their faces are much more pointed but they too are hairless and their language is unintelligible, mostly clicks.
They talk and talk and there are no roads or road signs.
They walk from place to place, living in small contained lives.
When they die they are given liquid to drink and they smile around their families.
There is mostly forest everywhere.
One day from across the ocean another race comes and rolls over them.
There are new cities. Streets now, and the language is smoother and cleaner and I quite like it more, and there are street signs with words that looks like the Wingdings font. I’m quite amused for the first time in 31,000 millennia.
by David Williams
I put the gun to my temple and fired, a well of black and cavernous sound, then I found myself looking down at the bed, blood leaking from my head onto the coffee table and some bright on the dark red carpet, as if screaming out. I seemed to be slipping away from the room, down the hall that was strangely strobed in red neon, the furniture in the den shifting apart as if sliding slowly, coming away, then as the door opened the house faded to deep cave walls of barren light, dripping water but no sound from the stalactites and one man’s face coming into the foreground.
He was sneering; his head shaved but hair in patches, gaunt and gray cheeks that seemed to stare more than the eyes.
‘What,’ he said. ‘Did you expect to find an answer?’
1
The rays parted and I stood where I was not standing and was at all points; the windows shifted, a thousand from one, as if some new creature unfolding its wings and the memory of everything began to leak; I saw the strobe again, remembered names and places, dates mixed and intertwined quite wrongly with each then a strong locking and breaking of both, as if I’d no more use or say to what would happen with them; the windows kept streaming, unfolding, and about their edges and wood panes wove blurs of their form, deep smears that trailed as they left, until those trailed pigments and the deep blush of lime wood conjoined together and flowed in one steep clime under a tree branch.
I looked at the tree branch, a long causeway of cobblestone curving from my feet about graves and marble statues between them at intervals, and a long sharp gating keeping it all together, the wind buffeting the flowers as if they were awake and bodies walking and dropping mementos and memories, and I stood there as straight and stiff as the wind and skirted softly the pattern of the rock path until I opened the gate door and walked through the traffic, lights on cars beaming as I passed through; I walked through a wood door then through a wall and was walking by a bridge but not on it, hovering over the water, then saw a tree and other trees shifting down the line in the wind, the wind more awake than ever I had seen in childhood or birth, the gray light of day slanted abrasive and tone-like and left its raw blades longer than I ever imagined, and no one walking on the streets or talking seemed to notice; I came from a treetop to a glass smudged with four-hundred forty-one fingerprints and entered a second story window in a novelty store where there were several brass ornaments, a chest and dusty books on sale in the chest for a dollar and I flowed from the stairs out of the front door, the bell not ringing or door moving.
I flowed from car to car and their lights came on as I did.
The next bridge a river would rush and then stop as if changing snapshots and the lights on a bright bridge to the left symbolized a great flag of white and red and blue, a great square pattern of lights, mostly out, and I moved from over that to a stadium of green seating and came upon a large, white temple that looked as if I’d known it recently; an ambulance pulled into it and a man flat and gray was taken on a stroller into a glass door and disappeared there; more ambulances pulled up and more men and women were rolled inside.
I creased from the lanes of traffic and no one knew as I entered nor did they know as I entered a convenient store. I tried to hold some powder doughnuts in a display but my hands passed through and I began to shriek and scream wildly:
‘FUCK! FUCK! I’M FUCKING DEAD WHY DID I DO THAT. WHY DID YOU DO THAT. WHY,’ and the man at the cashier didn’t look up; I walked through the table and the wall and a car parked in front of the wall and tried to open a door and my hand passed through up to the elbow.
‘FUCK ME. FUCK ME. FUCK ME!’
2
I make various oaths, standing in the wind and grass, feet leaving no imprints. “Dead,” I moan, hardly an echo, lips unable to form words; wind passes through.
I stand there fluttering like a defeated banner and tryst a bit in thought and then begin to think:
Perhaps I will be consigned to nothingness on the real plane of Earth for as long and far as Earth is here, and I will be alone and useless and unthought of and then the world will be eat away at the sun, billions of years, but I will be so insane my thoughts will be gone and I will be as the wind. All spirits are the wind. I am dead, it must be a truth; but as such, let me be eaten away slowly, let me die the truth, the wind; the second death.
The wind pushed; I felt it was the spirits; they are sometimes cold, sometimes bitter and sometimes warm and cloying in pockets but then cold all the same. They are rushing, howling; they are forces ever apparent, always recorded; sometimes harmless, sometimes killing in masses; they eat our words and prayers up and give us life and are death. It was so simple. Is so stark, clear, glaring, profuse. Why did I never know this.
But I digress. I am a condemned scion, a beacon of nothing that will slowly untwine its thought and human form and then be the invisible wind. I will crease and crease until I seem nothing at all and the pain of being unable to live or touch, to only look on, will push me to at first pain but then I will ignore the pain, and then ignore nothing, and then be nothing.
That is the living death. The second death.
The true death.
How long will it take.
3
3,400,000 Years Later
The earth is covered in ice.
I am covered in ice.
I see bodies, stark effigies of bodies, laying in blades of light ever caught in the ice, dull ice and sometimes dirty and filled with cars, with cities, and sometimes with blood and sometimes empty and clean but always like fireflies bodies; with nothing on their mouths or eyes and only dull tapestries of clothes and caught poses.
Poses of last moments, of moments they were living, of moments that were to come and they think are coming, you can see in their eyes: some are in cars, looking over hoods. Some are are sitting in benches and some walking streets and some floating like poppie seeds in the ice as if on wind above the sidewalks, caught like frozen ant farms.
Everywhere they are, like circuits of blood.
Everywhere.
I am caught. I am but the stone facts of this existence.
Where are the others. Where are the others.
I ask that until I think I see storms in my mind and clarities as sharp as lightning.
I ask that until I think God will come down and reveal the force behind the long drawn planning of my thought process.
And nothing comes. Nothing comes.
Nothing comes.
I think back to the one person, the last one.
4
3,476,000 Years Later
There is a ship landing in the ice.
The ice is mostly gone.
There are people coming out of the ships.
The wind is crisp and sharp and chorusing a welcome.
I hear their voices, the voices of ghosts, in water.
I hear them every day, in every way, on our shoulders.
I hear the people leaving the ships.
Building the world again, the sidewalks coming.
And the buildings rising, at first low short stories on sidewalks and dull brick and dull dirt road and then the paving comes and monuments and names I’ve never seen before are spoken.
300 years later light caves in one me; there is a saw cutting ice; there are men excavating bodies from ice.
I am not one of the bodies.
But I am set free.
When the ice finally sees light there is a great heave and gasp of air and vapor and oxidation; I am among that.
They are cutting now, painstakingly chipping away around frozen hands and eyes and legs and trousers caught in clarity.
They chip and chip, echoing.
5
Did I choose to be caught forever?
I don’t think much, there’s no question or answer.
I move against among new cities.
I move again and the people look the same.
I feel the sweet air and the tang of the sun and the bodies again as I pass through them like cars, every inch of them as if some saintly fiber.
The atoms are rushing like trillions of schools of fish.
The breath of a quadrillion men are in every breath every two seconds. I breathed Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Hitler and every serial killer has been in my lungs.
The cities look different.
They are impossible to describe. I feel like a revelation prophet given words to give meaning onto something that my vocabulary cannot encompass, but there is no angel or vision to give it truth or searing quality: I would, like John the Divine call them ridged serpents with heads of lions and seven dragons and teeth of great beasts and horns, but I’d be describing helicopters, gas, poison, buildings, exploding missiles.
In my ageless tongue I am useless to meet it.
In time the cities rise like flowers to the sun: they are stalks of metal, ridged and strangely warped and deformed with clear, crystalline bubbles on their top catching sun; grass grows inside; millions of people move in each one; cities inside.
They are arranged together in endless row, dotting the land.
The clouds move over the planet and I wish to leave it.
I watched a bit longer.
6
56,059,555 Years Later
The continent of Africa is crashed against Europe.
There is no Mediterranean.
Only Mediterranean mountains.
There are no glass cities.
There are no humans. Continents of grass.
There is no sign a city ever existed.
Only ridges and valleys, endless sun.
7
An ape is collecting coconuts from fir trees.
He is like no ape I have ever seen. His face is smart and the eyes attentive, very soft but hairy everywhere else; its legs and tail are long and always moving, very smart, and it swings about and in the night they all make a long chorus with the insects.
The apes sometimes meet and clean each others’ fur. There is a fight suddenly, a new group of apes raiding the open glade, and they take sticks and stones and smash the ones cleaning the fur and eat the bodies of the men, women, and children.
They hoot and holler with the insects.
Eventually they build a city.
Their faces are much more pointed but they too are hairless and their language is unintelligible, mostly clicks.
They talk and talk and there are no roads or road signs.
They walk from place to place, living in small contained lives.
When they die they are given liquid to drink and they smile around their families.
There is mostly forest everywhere.
One day from across the ocean another race comes and rolls over them.
There are new cities. Streets now, and the language is smoother and cleaner and I quite like it more, and there are street signs with words that looks like the Wingdings font. I’m quite amused for the first time in 31,000 millennia.
