The Patriarch
Part 1
Quite a time after The Patriarch’s death The Heresiarch speaks, reflecting upon The Patriarch’s life:
I find it hard to talk about someone who was both my Father and my Enemy, and whose death hangs over me like the weight of a bridge on many days.
The Heresiarch’s Kin speak to The Heresiarch:
Where have you not gone?
What have you not done?
What could happen, should you speak?
You wish to tell us about The Patriarch, then tell us!
The Heresiarch speaks then:
I prophesied his death.
I went a year without a word
between us. A year.
And then he was gone.
The Heresiarch’s Self speaks to The Heresiarch:
He lives still!
You know this, surely? Right?
But…
Regardless of The Endless Halls
he is dead.
What can be said about a human
after they are gone? What difference could it make
for us…
The Queen responds to The Heresiarch:
Here I am! Come and get me, dear Heresiarch!
You think you are them, or them, or them? Judas? Jesus? No!
Yes you are the one who will save my husband, but I will not worship anyone but the One! Yes. Yes! Yes…
The Heresiarch responds:
My Queen… I will never be born again to this world.
I am Smoke.
The Queen replies:
Then on with it; finish my husband’s eulogy, Son.
The Harbinger then breaks in to speak the rest of the sermon, in sorrow:
…for they will inherit the Earth…
The Queen responds:
It will not matter to me.
I want to hear The Heresiarch, his thoughts.
Tell me of my Love.
The Heresiarch hearkens:
He is dead. The Patriarch was a kind
of man who believed that Life was greater
than death, that his family could overcome.
The Patriarch felt more Love than fear.
The Patriarch worked unerringly for those
who he swore, likened to upon the dead
and dying husk of Rome, to protect…
from his enemies,
from the enemies of Rome…
The Patriarch’s heart beat like a bird.
The Patriarch was loyal to the Truth.
The Patriarch left behind their life
for the sake of the happiness of others,
continually; especially for you,
my Queen. The Patriarch was Joyful.
He died as he lived, as they say:
serious, sober, strong, lonely, ready.
The Queen speaks:
You tell me about my Husband,
but you do not know him. He
did not put out his eyes, rather,
he used them to Judge, and he
looked upon Horrors, his children not least
of those…
The Harbinger speaks:
That is the least that could be said about The Patriarch. Did he not
have enemies?
The Heresiarch speaks:
Rome was his Enemy!
The Matriarch speaks:
He was an ally of Rome!
He aided and abetted our great foe,
the False God, the State! He took not
the shortest path, but the easy path!
The Harbinger speaks:
He did.
He took the easy path.
For the path that he took was the path down through the corridors of our enlightenment.
He took the hardest, and the easiest path.
The Queen Speaks:
What similar demons can be described
for like company.
The Heresiarch speaks, interjecting:
Wait!
You wonder by a fantastic fount
of color and the chagrin of a slit
throat choking out the seven holy colors. The Patriarch would
put upon their walls paintings of
his children’s faces. He fought
in a war that he quietly detested,
for the suspended wealth of his family,
that it be made concrete.
Being simply kind, he was complex.
He was as much a prisoner of Rome
as we, brethren, kin…
One Prisoner of Rome speaks:
He was privileged, and did what all
privileged men do: he enjoined
his privilege with his pallet and thought
not enough for the freedom we all,
supposedly, stand for.
The Matriarch:
Hear! Hear!
Another Prisoner of Rome speaks:
He was as sick as a General of Rome;
he watched as Rome, again, piled our brothers’
small avian bodies in mounds.
He lit his own match.
He would have burnt the world,
like any man…
The Heresiarch:
Any man in service of Rome!
The Matriarch:
Hear! Hear!
The Queen:
Then, this be your discourse, I will
avert my attention. Is this all you have
to say about my Husband?
The Good Witch, hearkening, speaks of The Patriarch on behalf of The Queen:
Hearken!
When he was a guest of The Kingdom
of The Deified Ones
he learned their language.
When he was a guest of that Kingdom
He melded his ways to those of The Deified Ones. Is this
too a crime he has done?
His love was pure.
He was not given faculties of reason, that ill-formed ghost,
but faculties of heart. Who says to me that those faculties
he did not toil with, like with pick and axe?
Challenge my words if you will, but
I will contend with you, louts!
The Heresiarch:
What they say, Good Witch, is true.
As it is true of many men.
Myself included.
Rome has spooled us all
into skeins of unreason
and un-love both. He served death, as all who serve
the False God, the State, serve; yes.
But too he served life. As he chose.
When he could.
The Matriarch:
I, too, mourn his death. But the Truth
does not call Genocide
Peace Making.
The Heresiarch speaks:
I will defend his right to an eulogy
of Honor. He, though set against us,
was is his way most certainly a man
of Honor. He carried secrets to the grave.
He made love as men sometimes do,
with devotion untrammeled by doubt.
He laughed when others wept. He
stayed his tongue when disarray
of the mind and soul overtook me,
and others, many others. What bad
can be said about him can be said
about all of his ilk, those convinced
of the necessity of the State, False
Reality.
But what good he was of
was rare, and his alone.
He will be missed, especially by The Queen,
The Good Witch, and those who mourn him for the quality of his heart,
not the quantity of his folly.
You think this is an unfair Way of Judging?
At the service for his death I, Heresiarch,
and prophet,
lost my mind in mourning. Nothing was to be done.
Period.
Yet! He still grins at us from the grave – this seems True to me, no? And I,
the guaranteer of his great chagrin and
ill-peace.
…As long as we fight our friends
our enemies are ever at our door!!!
A third Prisoner of Rome speaks:
The angel rides!
The Patriarch was not without
an unflayed stasis. He found balance by seeking it;
and more than many. His heart was a
smoldering char upon The Altar. The
smoke of his passing did more to slay
forever the False God than we have
yet to see.
The Heresiarch:
But he is gone!
The Queen:
But he is gone!
The Good Witch:
Then I will go gather flowers
for him, that I may have a
gift clothed in splendor to match
his when next again I see him…
The Harbinger pronounces a single man’s verdict:
Judge not. Fools. A better world
is made by like men. It is the
False-God whom we rally to overthrow,
not his like! Call him what you like,
but his love for The Queen and his
children, though real, will not stop
the whirlwind, the Dread Whirlwind, when it comes. How
do you know that he did not do service
to Justice or Mercy? How can you
forget his patience, or his calculation…
The Good Witch Speaks an Incantation:
What happens now comes by way of
what has come before. Horror, hardship.
These are placeholders in a life which
has also places, times, of peace and
a radiant light.
You think we happen to last within
The Seven Goddesses and their Graces
without muddying our hands.
My hands are muddied.
My whole body has been subsumed by the Earth,
our home. In Earth and dirt I stand
baptized to the future, for I would
soil myself in The Mother to show that, though we
lost him, all is not lost.
The Heresiarch:
I would soil myself in The Mother
to show that,
though we lost him, all is not lost.
The Harbinger:
Yet! we teeth on roses and come up
for water and sun!
A Prisoner speaks, a stockaded Jester:
No one lost more than I, The Queen
aside. I knew him as both Brother and
King. Citizen. Honor falls…to those
who make peace. Who are we to
say who that man should have been?
The Queen:
I weep! I exult!
The Jester speaks:
Let me free of these stockades and
I will soil myself in The Mother to show
that, though we might have lost him, for a time,
all is not lost forever…
The Queen:
I weep! I exult!
The Heresiarch speaks:
All of these words are true.
What we have lost is what all who love
greatly lose. I mourn! I exult!
My penance but a pittance in the
great ether of the Void. The Dread Mother swallows us all should we
sully his Name and Honor, for truly,
though we lost him, all is not lost.
The Dread Mother laughs:
Nervous Children! Come! children. Tell me again of
my Son and love! The light of the moon would be a beacon for You,
who see as through the eye of a key-hole. Such darkness!
Time now. Leave behind your sorrow!
To live! To weep and exult and
celebrate!
These my Son, My Patriarch, would have for all of you,
my children.
You should know him better than that.
The Heresiarch:
That, then, is what it stands as. To you,
as always, we bow in deference, Dread Mother.
Part 2
The Queen Laments:
His children did not love him!
His peers did not love him!
His friends did not love him!
His associates did not know him!
Weep!
Lament!
A tool of the system
was used against the system.
Foregone conclusions: I am alone!
Weep!
Lament!
Weep!
Lament!
His ego did not rout him!
His tears were kept spit!
His gills were a torrent
of rockets and disease!
His feet call me homeward; to the grave! Weep. Weep.
Sincerity aside, all you
who claim to love him love only
yourselves!
I miss him!
I want to feel him!
Lament!
Weep!
His subservience lasts my whole body!
His heart is the only breath!
His love for you is nothing
compared with his love for me
and for all who weep for Babylon!
His passing is celebrated!
With tears!
Weep!
Lament!
Lament!
Weep!
We
cannot call him back now
and must wait
till the dawn.
Part 3:
In the land of Nothing where we go to retrieve past persons, we go attend to our desires, and the Lament of Gaia. In this dreamworld the 13 speak. The Matriarch, in deference to The Queen, asking for The Heresiarch to have an honest time of mourning, opens the discussion; the 5 answer.
The Matriarch:
War forever between our kind!
War! War!!!
The Dread Mother:
Fighting does not solve anything.
The Matriarch:
Divorce. Good for the hygiene.
The Dread Mother:
I can smell the smoke
of our burning!
The Poet:
Three days. Weeping at my
altar.
The Good Witch:
Three days weeping at my altar.
The Harbinger:
Three Days!
Weeping!
At My
Altar!
But a candle is lit…
The Poet:
Will be strong again…
Will be strong.
Will be strong again…
I will be…
The Good Witch:
You are…more than you think.
The Poet:
And so I wanted to see you, nimbly;
to dance fancifully with you; to kiss you
though I do not rise
from death.
But now to rise.
The Harbinger:
They feed rarely, and on vegetation…
They do not rope the feedings
with nets, drawn of ether,
through the Outside, gathering the young,
the weak, the matriarchal lineage,
souls,
as stock, food. They war
with their hungers till they have no masters.
And the Priestess of Yatwer;
how she was born again…
How the strength of youth afresh
grace given to her limbs – a soul
lifetimes and more and old
speaking out to flaunt, no…mock
before The Patriarchal Council.
What of the teeth in her pupils,
in her mouth?
What of her head snapped back
in her cackling?
And she was taken – to take,
herself – to heap
Damnation upon men who cannot say no.
Who feel privileged to hear ‘yes.’
No.
Yes.
Maybe.
A whole world will cavort in fury.
Fright, and lacking, and the
great and most potent, powerful three:
Destitution, Deprivation, Desperation,
these will dance in the flight and dance
of the absent crowns.
We bring a world whirling down.
The Matriarch:
It’s time to pull out all the stops.
Take stance, my friends
we face the cops
we face the State
and hungers wait; deter feeding,
meditate on hunger, and on need,
and on the need for needless things,
and on the furious wroth of the whipping,
the gathering rising that builds as a fount
the whole and entire overturning
that comes to us as science awakens
a final dawn
to rival ours.
The Poet speaks to The Matriarch:
The present can’t see.
It is blind, but has vision.
The purging of empires… to it then.
I remember
when I sought both you
and my sobriety
our tribe, this collective
of souls, and you,
led up into the mountains,
to the fire, and far from anywhere.
On the way the ground
covered like a cloak of eyes
with leaves ground into loam
and mud; each leaf a face, I saw
the millions of spirits
witnessing in rejection
my profane passing. I had to climb.
But I could not have both my freedom
and you. I had not the strength.
I was watched,
as we passed the stone
where the heads of white settlers
were broken open.
The millions of spirits saw me
with hunger,
their looks were screaming sound,
voices in an undulating chorus,
and they railed in my mind
– screaming eyes –
the presences of thousands upon thousands.
There, having reached our camp,
all took up their roles
and I my idiocy.
Into the fire we stared;
I wondered at the pyramid of the pit,
that souls were used
as blocks in architecture
unkind
fed feeding upon feeding others,
and all but one eaten.
There, the choice battered, calmly;
I turned it down.
I would not stand in the fire,
even bare of foot,
even to atone,
even to atone for my people,
even to save us all…
The Poet continues:
And then the Halls –
the bottomless fathoms stretching upward,
great trees, pillars, rising rising,
the whole vast dark Hall
waiting and seething with the future,
the hordes abutting the fire-light’s edge
and we wondered
that we were mortal.
The Matriarch:
But do you remember
that day, before night,
we walked paths,
we climbed the mountain.
We were to be wed,
and like this: I showed you
– God was a machine, to be free
you hand to throw off your bondage –
the eye of the machine: a reality
that demands perspective.
You were to realize your slavery
was to falsity.
Why didn’t you see?
Is it too late, not to take hands,
but to view
the slavish fawning before the fount
of a dry harbor
that is God?
The Poet:
Here is what happened
the night after we climbed
only partway
up the mountain:
After the fire,
and the towering height of the dark Halls
we had a meager repast,
for I would not eat,
and we retired to bed
and I lay next to you seething
with need:
my every breath, the eye
of the God opened, my every exhale
it closed.
The Good Witch:
Stop!
Feed Brother!
Feed on ether.
The Heresiarch:
Do you not value your lives?
The Good Witch:
We very much value our lives.
The Poet speaks to The Harbinger:
Something…has happened today.
The Harbinger:
What was that?
The Poet:
I want to Live and Die!
They counted against me today
a gift freely given!
Threw my greed back in my face!
And I did not squirm!
I sat, then, upon the grass,
sickeningly healthy, unnatural, green,
upon the berm of the roadside
– and I wondered – for they told me
that I had made the world.
‘Surely not,’ I can hear you recount
the folly of my insanity. But I heard
that a man would choke on fire
for every time I counted my fingers
and added them to ten;
bringing time into the garden.
I heard that there was a sickening weight
laid freight upon a man
for every breath of smoke I dared
heavy beyond toiling unto breaking,
but the weight was broken…
and that man rebirthed as I.
‘Surely not,’ I said, and recounted
the folly of my pride to myself
twenty four times till I heard
in the voice of a woman in song
that I had to breathe back through
my past
and recount what had come before.
And it was this…
The Good Witch:
She has the manuscript; and has read it.
She praised you.
Now finish it.
The Harbinger:
I have heard this story, but I delight
in the foibles of your curse
and sight! Again, bring it round.
The Dread Mother:
So mote it be.
Ha Ha! Ho Ho!
The Poet:
Dread Mother NO!!! Please!
May I say yes to someone to break this curse.
The Dread Mother:
Maybe.
The Poet:
‘Yes.’
The Poet continues:
I have seen the legions of Hell
tromping fire, shoulder to shoulder.
Dared God, in a storm at thirteen,
to take me or best me. At seventeen
a light was cast beside me,
to my utter horror – I saw my
un-worth and twisting. Upon my face
in the mirror
there was a soundless plummeting
dismay.
I balked. It was I. Turned after the
morning sun to pray,
and a sickness was taken from
my breath.
At eighteen, on September the tenth,
all night I was commanded
to stand unmoving, my arms
stretched out,
in the darkness of the room;
upon waking
I forgot both command and pain.
I have broken into shadows on Earth,
where there was only void.
At twenty two
the world began to catch fire
with my every breath
till it merged with and ringed the Earth
and all capsized, fighting, desperate,
at the etheric heat
of an insane curse, that did nothing
in truth but tell
of further inanities in future days
when I would watch
for years
in visions
crucifixion after crucifixion.
This I have seen.
Part 4:
The Patriarch congratulates his son and thanks him for the eulogy, the elegy being only in the distant future, when it is all put to play:
What have you seen?
What has happened?
Here we are. In the south,
in the summertime.
We get to go to camp
because our culture is built
upon slaves.
And I am a slave master.
Oh God…
How many John Browns
were there? With only one
beating our breasts for…
I am so sorry
I do not always remember you.
Countless thousands over 10,000 years,
for and of every creed and kind
and purpose,
fighting for the right or
the good, or for freedom. So many
making the ultimate sacrifice
for reasons all their own; so many
different reasons. So many
imprisoned for life, for years,
hung and nailed and marched
and shot
and sitting rotting now in untold
thousands
crammed into a box
and then and now, and on this day
sentence passed
to trap and squeeze and freeze
and damn
so many even today
to never see the light again.
And your stories go unsung.
And I think I die for them but not
for you.
And so I hear some will never be known.
And I want all to be freed from this,
just like you did, too; Ammar…