The one where I tell the truth…

 

 

Things have been hard. But they are getting better. I’m standing taller. And every day there seems another thing to knock me back down. But I’m getting up again. Every damn time.

But I’m not writing a lot yet. So I’m speaking how I can. Healing as I can. Getting better as I can.

 

Truth

I wander,

lost

In the alien void,

a cloak,

a ghost.

A ripple of blackness in the void of sharp things and night.

 

Then I see one,

lost and alone.

A perfectly formed creature of light and life

grimly trudging in this place

where it does not live,

and does not belong.

 

For it stumbles to its knees.

And my heart aches

For this is a being of the sun

but its glow is so faint

flickering and faltering

weeping golden drop of dusk into a dark world that does not care.

 

I glide forward

insides twisting and dancing

deathly afraid of the glowing, beautiful thing.

I touch it and it burns me.

Fire upon my dark skin

But the light, the light is brighter as it searches the darkness for hope.

 

I see the embers of my flame kissed hand,

and to the face of beauty that weeps

and I spread myself like the dusk

and settle upon the burning beauty

The agony is immediate

And it fills all my senses as I scream…

 

And then it is gone, running.

It is bright again,

it is healthy, whole.

and as fireflies borne of my own skin flicker past my eyes

It is able to move on

and it does.

 

I see the burning dawn on the horizon

I know the angel will be alright.

So I flee into the dark

The caves, alone

in the night that never ends

alone.

 

But again, in starlight

I emerge and wander in my sadness

and again, a beautiful wanderer

and again, used and discarded.

To make them strong

left to convalesce in the dank.

 

But it changed me, these angels.

I saw a simmering radiance on the walls of my cave

and I knew the burns had healed black

But inside, the fire still burned

Still glowed.

And I wondered if the night would ever have me back.

 

But then it came,

An angel with only a flicker of luster

wounded and alone.

And I stayed my hand,

for fear and memory burned me.

Worse than any reality ever could.

 

But those eyes, those glorious portal of a sojourning soul

could finally see me and begged for contact,

for understanding.

I dove into the angel and the fire turned me into a bonfire.

But I knew the true nature of love.

And it is what you give, not what you receive.

 

I fell to the rocks,

Fire tracing my every fiber, discarded and alone.

I heard the angel shift,

I waited to hear it walk away.

But then it touched me, lifted me

and held me to its burning breast.

 

I screamed and I roared

I burned and I felt I would die

and so it set me down

and began to walk to the dawn

but even as it walked, and the fires died on my skin

I saw the angel, and saw the beautiful burning soul streaked with the blackest night.

 

I dragged myself from the thorny ground

And I flew for the celestial form

I settled about it

but it flung me off

and ran for the dawn

powerful, and light, and dark, and strong.

 

I chased it with tenacity

and with speed and soul and songs

and still it ran.

Until I realized it wasn’t running from the night.

It was running from me, and the hurt it could do to me.

And we came to the celestial line, and it stumbled again.

 

I raced beyond it as it again fell,

Standing between a painful life with it and the doom behind me.

and I saw the sparkling streams of sadness

strung through with darkness, my darkness eating at the light.

But the sun was coming. Coming for me.

And the angel reached for me, afraid.

 

I burst with speed I flew like the wind.

Into the arms of the sun.

The light it seared me

it punched through to my core.

It ripped apart everything it touched

And I screamed in the light, my flaws laid bare.

 

I cried as I burned, in the light of a new dawn

Fears like fissures dripping with fire

and an amalgam of truth punching into my core

as I screamed.

I cried.

The angel crawled beyond endurance to the edge of the dawn.

 

It reached for me

from inside the night,

Tears falling like rain.

And I reached for it,

fires from my body

pouring black smoke into the sky

 

The angel lurched, it flailed, the sky burning the night inside it

and it came under the nourishing eye of the day.

It enveloped me into its arms.

and together we burned,

and together we cried

as the night was taken from us in a conflagration

 

And finally, finally,

one did for me what I had always done for them.

And after I looked into the angel’s perfect eyes.

And I waited. For we were burning.

But I had hope.

That at least We would burn together.

 

Burn until the night, the darkness inside,

was gone forever,

and we could walk hand in hand.

Through every day, and every night,

together.

The one where I give hope.

See? There I go lying. And at Christmas, too.

I’m not sure if I could give hope, that I would give hope, to be perfectly honest. It’s no longer ‘hip’, or ‘in’. Apparently anyone who doesn’t believe that fairly soon several dozen dystopias are going to have a wild Mortal Combat Style Armageddon all over the earth is just not living in reality. Most of those that espouse this belief are environmentalists, but several are survivalists, and even some fairly straightforward gun owners. I have found, however, that the further left – politically –  the orientation of those I’m talking to, the more I am treated as a hostile force for stating, in effect:

Have hope.

And I don’t mean that people get a little snippy because we disagree. I mean they start wagging a finger at me, continue by poking me in my chest with it, and end with them sticking it in my eye and screaming that I should apologize for getting my face in the way of his finger. I have been called an idiot, a racist, and a cynic. I get asked a lot of questions, a lot of them nonsensical. Others come down really to: yeah, who sez? Well, that’s the one I can deal with. You see, I know who says:

History.

Let me be completely honest: I do not believe in Anthropomorphic Global Warming. I believe it is a scam of the highest order meant to fleece people of money by the truckload. I do, however believe in acid rain and brown air. Neither is good, and we can take steps to curb these facets of modern life. I do believe there is sufficient reason for developments in technology and society to occur in order to solve these problems. History abounds with examples.

At the turn of the 20th century everyone was sure the primary mode of transport was going to end civilization. Hundreds of thousands of people were living in one place at one time in the largest cities the world had ever seen. Long ago, city planners had developed a plan for dealing with the… leavings… of their fellow humans, but then came the horses. Owned by more and more people, used for transport and mechanical power, each ate so much that people starved as the prices of foodstuffs were driven up as horses competed with families. Excrement lined the streets. How much? Wonder why homes built during that time have steps from the street up to the front door?

There were areas cleared, pits dug, and then filled and filled until they became mountains. Vermin were everywhere, rats and roaches and worse infecting, and biting and infesting. The city – all cities – smelled like being locked in a garbage truck with a herd of incontinent animals.

But just as everything seemed darkest, and it was certain that civilization had run into the brick wall of its own waistline, a miracle happened.

Actually that is another lie, and it shows an incredible lack of understanding. A guy comes along and invents the internal combustion engine. That’s right: The car ended an environmental catastrophe that threatened all of western civilization: The horse.

So, do you know: Nicolas Joseph Cugnot?
Remember in the 60’s when people were looking at massive earth overpopulation, that there was no way to fee d so many people? Has anyone read that India, Russia, and China needed food so badly, but America’s breadbasket could not sustain much more… Then there came ANFO, fertilizing the dwarf wheat that Norman Borlaug developed, allowing more efficient use of the soil. Populations continue to rise, and – if governments stop subsidizing and meddling in the markets, we can do it cheaply.

You know what makes me angry? You know what turns me into a towering inferno of rage? You know what makes me want to forge weapons made of my very own fangs and bile and hurl them into the faces of the pessimists that scream about Armageddon? This is history. It has happened. It is the pattern of human kind since the beginning.

Despite the fact that history says the hero we so desperately need is already here, already working, and we probably won’t remember his name or give him any credit once he does what he does, they have spent all this time trying to convince you that we stand on the edge of oblivion. And when you call them on it they sputter, and moan, and then they attack as viciously as any pack of scavengers.

Let me circle back around. I don’t believe that man created Global warming, but I don’t like pollution. The person working on the next generation of energy and transportation is almost done. I know this because history tells me so. Just like the stock market, where everyone is waiting for a crash like a bored spectator at a NASCAR rally: They trumpet the downs, but the trend is always upwards. Slow, steady, shaky from time to time, with downs to be sure, but human history always looks toward the point above the horizon.

I first said I wanted to give you hope. Then I admitted that this was a lie. Hope is internal. You must give you hope. You must nurture it. You must want it.

No matter how uncool hope is, it is history, it is the truth.

And everywhere I look, I am proved correct.