a sea of eyes, watch them wave

[italiceyeball]

An asterisk in a frying pan. Dissolute peddlers of morning sickness, pregnant only with reptilian hunger. What does the dead eye see? If the sun set asymptotically, if the gun recoiled forever, if the crash never ended, I'd tell you a story about sad people with antlers dancing round a fire for the last time. I'd tell you how they sang, and how that song broke me over its knee, how it murdered my pretensions at humanity. Don't misunderstand, I was never unironic, or, God's Teeth!, saccharine. Please. But even amidst youth's orgies of irony I at least felt something! An eventual offense at my vicious self mockery, a betrayal at that offense, a fascination with infinite regress and so on. Ah, to be young again, eh Herr Doktor? To be vital with such acridity! But, as they say, decay is wasted on the old. A real taste for blood combined with a certainty of impending doom? Ha, you'd be a God- I suspect these are the old souls among us, the ones too mad even for death to completely erase. Me? Oh no no, I unveiled the mysteries of the universe just now. I was a lamb before, a real treat, see? That's what I'm trying to tell you. I heard the song and my heart stopped bleating. I forgot my name- not the sound, but the meaning, and joined them round the fire, twin points of pain blossoming from bone, my head heavy with new branch, two lines of blood crossing my eyes, streaking down cheeks, mixing with the churned ash of the dance floor.

The stars gave up when the fire went out. We rose as smoke to a dream ended.

-

I resist retelling this tale, of course, not because, like in so much else, I fear misunderstanding- but the opposite. I retell it incessantly, of course, because it's the only well in town.

And we're still thirsty.