Dirty Life #7

A thousand years I have striven not to strive. And now. Nothing to do for the first time in a thousand years. I am no more and still the light has not taken up my place. When the wall went blank and stayed blank and I waited without awaiting, the wall became a pair of eyes and looked into me with so much pain that I stood up. I've been sitting here an eternity too long. To forget is the original sin. The wall is dead but the eyes live. One and one is always one. But where is we? Angry for the first time.

My disciple is shocked by my unholy fire, he doesn't know me anymore. I was almost home and now just as lost as everyone else. I no longer accept his offering of rice. Four walls know as little as one. Behind the window the sun is raining. No time to explain, I embrace him and hang my mantle round his shoulders.

"This is my last commandment. I'm leaving now, and after you've eaten that rice, you go outside too and you tell everyone you come across, every traitor, every child, all the priests and all the soldiers, you tell them all that I'm on my way to the West and that I'll be there before the evening falls."

The sun is raining in my face. I see the mountains for the first time since the invasion. I taste the wind and plot my course. Through the living dust of dead stars. To the house where the Little Red Book sits next to the Book of the Dead... Come, take me now, you who call yourselves liberators, I'm ready, my heart and my arms are open, let your sticks and swords and bullets break me loose...

And yet. Still that old fear of the flesh. The death pain. No giving in to the stupor this time. No more forgetting. No wasting years on their words and their love. Already in the distance I can hear the devils coming.

All words and images copyright 2008 by Vanita & Johanna Monk