Broken glass dreams play rounds of chicken underneath a pinpricked night sky. Children burning alive with amphetamine ignite fires in abandoned storefronts and tenements. Pour the gasoline, get high for a second, get off on the fumes and the rush, drop the match then run into the woods. Cherished material dependence makes excellent tinder for the bright flames. New religion forming from the acetylene overdose.
We started a program, a city ordinance, a unanimous decision upon action as we barricaded ourselves inside City Hall, candlelit ceremony carried over from centuries of mutilation rituals. Break their fingers so they can't hold the flames. Destroy youth before it destroys you.
Graveyards on rooftops; pray they get delivered through divine intervention from the vandalism. The older ones in the group clutch at their beads and shout up at their gods to save them.
"How do we dream when our coffins fill up with shit? How do we magnify this ache?"
God in three persons, holy trinity.
What they don't know is that there are no more living gods on our side. The ones starting the fires have no gods either, except for themselves and their whitecross destruction.
The caretakers of the graves, the bravest ones, the ones with little left to hand over to the immolation, they sit and wait patiently, shovels and picks gripped within heavy leaden hands, wrapped in stained leather, the brains tripping over snags, daydreaming about the cruel grasp of internment. They are the only ones who know firsthand of the solitary death, the lonely beast, alone forever. They've seen our grandparents' faces, rigor mortis anxiety gasping shrieking fear no longer lurking at the edges. They threw spadefuls of dirt down on their frozen pieces.
They also know that no eternity lasts forever. Their soot-smeared forms shall be the last we see before they bury us, turning every one of us in our own due time into an effigy, a laughing screaming nightmare pinwheel spinning into oblivion.
And the children destroy the churches, toppling the crosses and crowns and our old traditions, the ideals we could never force ourselves to amount to. The wholesale destruction is mighty, with a roar like the drone of locusts, every one of our fucking prophecies coming true, so real we refuse to believe the ground is crumbling beneath our foundations.
There are talks of a mass suicide, a final plunge into forever that would leave us preserved from their fires, from their revisions, from their drug-fueled shamans making wild predictions of coming wars and deifications. They press hot coals into cheeks and soft flesh, as we are told. They mark themselves permanently, to separate them from us if they should ever try to become us. That's the only thing they fear, I know that now. They're afraid of becoming the prey.
I have visions now, of the end times coming and new gods descending from the spirals. Those once imprisoned by belief now are filled with a new ache, the chants rumbling from the hell below them, the inverted invocations of a thousand Black Masses, the adversary's age looms upon my mind's horizon. No Sunday maze mind fields left to explore, the wings of immolated angels blot out sunlight that the light bringer bears. They all know it's here, yet no one's ready to swallow the cyanide capsules and become a part of the mechanism.
I can hear them louder and louder every day; lust squeals and babies melting from the intense heat outside. They don't care for the defenseless young, the way we did. We cradled all of them to our bosom. They feast upon infant fat, roasted for gluttons. They know we are jealous of the meals.
This dream is almost over. I only wish it didn't have to end, if I could only continue the suffering for moments more, to drag out a few more drops from the emptying death-sac. We deserve it, and so much more.
