There are two paths through life; the way of murder and the way of distaste. Perched atop my throne of calcified limbs and dapper grins, I mangle mango-rinds and toss fiber-filled skins to the gripping palms of sweat-caked peasants lingering below hungrily. From the point of view of an insect, all is magnificent and splendid, but appreciation is wasted on antennae. For man, each megalith is barely satiable, and with each achievement comes a rekindled desire to create more and to stoke the flames of our synapses.
If one wishes to conquer the accomplishments of another, the only possible choice is murder, and if not murder, then the walkway of guilt, lined with the distasteful memories of various failings. To inherit our fathers' skills we must devour them whole like titans and digest their minds. That the entirety of human history has been a tale of consumption is clear, but just where to apply that hunger has become the issue of contention splitting apart men, mushy sinew under the influence of blunt chemical reactions.
But past the grit of pears left on the ground in smatterings of saliva, John's truth remains untested and the Word that was God has become gibberish, only legible to those who sprint at walls with skulls alight, and the passion to recognize that oftentimes comatose states are preferable. A leap of faith is nothing more than a sacrifice of the soul to some greater entity, and if the self-sacrificial party is convinced enough in his savior, than that figure will appear to them upon leaping, unless they survive said leap, in which case the chance-return to regularity will be regarded as a “miracle,” and the surety of the eunuch will be cemented by pure probability.
Even when given a proper education and a list of the typical fallacies faced by man, we choose to go the spiritual route, as if by some preternatural knowledge that past the lines of type etched into pages of linen, and further than the symbolism indelibly seared into our senses of self, there exists a bridge into the ethereal, which has become a fact so deeply ingrained into our consciousness that we silently revere yogis and the art of meditation, allowing it to trickle into the divinity of western culture via the beatniks and poetic movements of the 1960's.
Yet, regardless of our simultaneous passion for inclusion and seeming need to be isolationist, there is a Puritan desire to intoxicate the rebels of our nation with drugs and the sooty underbelly of legal divisiveness. It is with the judge's gavel that we chase away pesky differences and attempt to extricate any frightening elements of a culture, boldly waving our whitewash brush and offering any immigrant the opportunity to succeed (given a hefty caveat). Appearing as children in painted faces, we hoot and holler like savages, making games to entertain, and once in our clutches, we yank their hair and spit tobacco in their eyes until they agree to jaunt by our rules and work in our mills. It is said that children know no bigotry, but it is with absolute prejudice that we train our children, socializing their once bright eyes with the dim, flinty anathema of promised democracy and social mobility.
We are criminals and crooks, but of the off-touch moral persuasion that we are somehow saints. If it were at all possible to be both a clergymen and an undertaker at once, and in fact to operate the entirety of the morgue in league with the butcher's slicer, then we would be truly just, and the circular nature of our roles in the city would be understood. For now, however, we remain shadows of the dust, memories long forgotten by moral men but basking in the insanity of lesser men, biding our time until some chance wind or accidental blow shuttles us back into the hearts of humanity and breeds the chaos necessary for our birth burial.
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