Fragment 68 /Midsummer /Compline /Wed, 23 Dec 1998
As the industria comes to an end, the roadside fades into isles of graveyards, caravan parks and gas stations, until Jude arcs his car onto a dark unlit road winding up out along the cliffs of the coast. Below the ocean seethes black and lonely in its dense becalmed mass. The world gives way into an illuminated electric nerve system that lights the night’s darkness all across the bay. It is pulmonating as if in attempt to eradicate the darkness. Above the town the moist air sets the basin beautifully in the eerie glow of a thickening mist arising from the black sea. He pulls off the road, before reaching the summit, to where a few pines grow, precarious with their own lives. He squints through the windshield at their scraggly existence.
/shall i carry on living then/ /a wandering star reserved for darkness/ /can i live a life doomed to wait for God to come/ /knowing destruction will come/ /and keep trying to stay out of the grasp of babylon and her church/
He balances the wine bottle on the seat next to him, leans over to the cubby hole and takes out a plastic bag.
/help those of us who know we are helpless and those that dont even know they are blind/
The cobwebbed echo of the old pray running suddenly through his mind rises a bitter ire in him.
/but they soon wont be blind/ /they soon wont be/ /and the shock of being made to see/ /plagues of the mind and body/ /and they will curse God because of them/ /and they will destroy what is left of the church/ /blaming it for keeping them blind/
His hands shakily try to cut crystals as his voice breaks out loud and cynical, a sneer on his face with each spoken line.
“Oh but Christmas time. The advent of our Lord. The promise of his second coming. And mass will be full of them. Blind. Pretending. All before a God who will not hear them. Who has spat us out of his mouth.”
In the dark night-illuminated vessel that holds him here atop this black natural darkness overlooking the electrified existence of man, he lifts his makeshift plate to his nose. One, two, three. A moment to snort them in.
/their blindness grows/ /a blindness caused by their own eye salve/ /so that they will see before them only beauty and dignity/ /while truth clambers in around them in famine and war/ /up to that day of great violence/ /when babylon will be thrown as a millstone into the sea/
Four, five, six. He throws his head back on his seat, sniffs hard and closes his eyes. Slowly the white crystals take their possession of him.
/i feel as if i am trapped between two lives/ /in a body of an old blind man with sagging female breasts/ /as one who has foresuffered all/ /i have sat below their city walls/ /ive walked among the dead/