Step Into The Light (Poetry and Prose Journal)

Bits and Pieces (Prose)

I set the world on fire to watch it burn. I took all that you hold dear and before I ground it to dust, showed you the futility of your hopes. I captured your dreams and consumed them not as one would enjoy exquisite food or drink, but as the furnace consumes coal. I took everything that you were and told you that it had been wrong, then I denied you the future and watched your present smolder into smoke and ash.

The fires burn on, continually and unceasing. The black smoke shrouds the light of day just as the orange glow gives life to the press of night. Out of the fire was brought forth the idea that as purposeful and important you think your life is, ultimately it is all sound and fury. In the span of a second the living cease to be. In the span of a day all physical traces are removed. In the span of a year all traces are forgotten and it is as if they never were. 

Why does the human soul scream to be remembered? Why do the egyptians say that to have the name of the dead spoken again is to give them new life? Are we so lost in living in this world, our reality, that we cannot bear to imagine a world without ourselves to occupy it? 

This is why I brought you here, to watch the melting of memories. Eventually the press of time bring an end to us all. Who here is afraid of the nightfall that must come after the setting of the sun? Every hand is raised. Each personal sun must rise and set by its own accord- the fate of man brought and wrought by his fellows. 

What does the sound of nothing feel like? Is it like an invisible blanket pressed over your eyes and into your ears? What should the parting thought of man be to his natural world? So long. Goodbye- though to him there might be naught good about the parting. Is the history of man a dark rage against these dark fires of amber night? Is the turning of the wheel such that none can stem this flow of time? Trapped against the moving wall- watching the seconds slip by with the determination of a steady river.

Ultimately each man must do at least two things alone. Man is brought into the world alone, and man must die alone. Why do we seek to spend every waking second in between those two moments in the company of as many our companions as we may find? Man is a social creature, and cripplingly so. We can see as man mature that he gives less of a crap about what his fellows will and won’t do. Ultimately the question put before the adult is not how others will live with their actions, but how they will live with themselves. Accountability shifts to the individual from the group and in this synergy the full realization of individual potential is realized. The mature man does not deny his end, but embraces his infinite mortality. Those who dream of a world without death also unknowingly request a world without life. Just as surely as there can be no light without contrasting darkness, there can be no life without contrasting death. 

Embrace your fate, enter your mortality without the regrets of one who has not lived, but recall instead the passing present and the fleeting greatness of this momentous instant. 

Pitiless rage and remorseless revenge- you are the cleansing fires that burn away all that does not seem to matter. You ignore weak forgiveness and the burden of consequences. You refresh the spirit and insist on red fury to be your tune and tool of task. You turn the betrayers from men into monsters. You give the betrayed the will to win against what they see can only be their blackest hearts.

The dark horrors of battle succeed in bringing out the darkest and brightest of the human spirit. The heros and the villains stand tall and take their places in history. The virtues and vices become clear. Cowards and the courageous join or flee the fray- and the passions of men possess them so much that they turn from rationality and reason into automations with singleminded drives.