no mercy

Mercy goes missing at the wrong end of the blade, leaving only meat and murder. Whole days dissolve in that spell of blame and blood, limbs slick with the work of seeding the world with worms. We have learned to hide our eyes from death only to go numb when its workings are again revealed. We have learned to embrace slaughter where there is no feast, violence where there is no claim. We think ourselves outside the animal truth, and so our gods of wroth and ruin consume all that we ought to be.

Bruises and scars weave into these blunt imaginings, the toll of want and wishing soiling the gutters and salting the fields. Madmen have written your scripture and hunger for your soul, kings and generals who would burn you for reading light ask for your noble sacrifice. All the ills of our lost tribes without the blessings of kinship. All the risks of our endless wars without a victory to be seen. Bodies stacked like cordwood because some long dead lords tore their songs from the air around them. Illness spread because the deep knowing tells us to heed the words of the ancients.

The whole of the world is broken by soldiers and scholars. Priests and poets crush hope and truth beneath their clumsy feet. Faith in the hole in reason, belief in the riot of the unknowable write this dumb history. The lies are told in tics of language, the lies are rote in notions of absolutes. Ideology as idolatry, reverence only in that which is unreal. The world burns down and all that you honor is a promise made to nothing. All this evil because of a contract made with something less than a ghost.