faster

There are rivers of blood that abut this house. Streams of livid flesh and intent that arrived upon my shores many years ago. Tangled teachings and lessons learned and story after story gleaned from the cusps where one tongue becomes the next. Trees and tales and slender branches bowed with the best fruit. Stones rolled away and the dead again alive and all the bravura of nameless gods and forgotten heroes. A cult of war caught up in brotherhood religions, the hunter's trail leading through the farmers fields, bearing the wisdom of the wild and the tamed.

Wave-forms collapse with every shift of focus. The world is painted in wait and want, everything unsettled beneath our dancing feet. You hear the worried prating about culture wars, usually made by those that have just become aware that there are ways held that are not their own. The truth is that every road traveled changes something, every meal shared or word mispronounced. Art and ritual and apostasy changing shape over years rather than millennia. The received wisdom of the ancients spills from every lip, the temples all empty, as useless as tombs.

The news is full of war and theft, these dead-pan expansions of broken oaths and brutal certainty. Bullets and bombs play at persuasion, while these made up strictures of oil and specie are offered to those who bleed and starve. Towers built upon the shifting sands scant decades ago are held up as proof of the story of civilization. The march of progress, slave ships and burning forests, dead soil and blackened fields. Caught up in the steep decline, the last words of human striving that impatient cry of faster, faster.