Death.
A concept.
A reality.
The state when a life is plunged into a state of nothingness,
Absolute and empty.
This world is not a slave of time.
It is far beyond it.
It is the emptiness,
The absolute freedom.
No words.
No reason.
No reality.
No time.
Nothing.
It is the state of absolute nothing.
It is the state of absolute freedom.
It is death.
A concept.
A reality
Day turns to night.
Daylight melting away into darkness,
Life melting away into the arms of
The dead.
Laughter turns to silence,
Memories turn to dust,
All that’s left are burning ashes,
Scattered across the planet’s deserted crust.
We’re all his captives.
We’re all his prisoners-
Pale and helpless,
Waiting for the time he knocks on our door
And offers us a ride in his dark carriage.
Kings turn to servants,
Servants turn to slaves,
Names and faces are forgotten
As crowns and spades are abandoned.
He is the ultimate judge
The unquestioned ruler of the darkness.
We all fall to his frozen touch,
His frozen tendrils lingering and crushing both
Mind and heart,
Forcing the soul to desert
the body it used, tore and abused.
He remained the same,
Since the times of Egypt and Rome,
To the worlds of Hitler and Stalin.
Always prompt,
He executes his job,
never taking a single day off.
He’s an excellent worker.
He loves his job.
He never speaks a word.
He only observes from the shadows,
Like a raven perched on a branch at the graveyard,
He’s got no use for words.
Communication is for mortals.
He watches infants grow.
He courts the lonely teenager.
He comforts the wiling adults.
He guides the nostalgic grandmother.
He resides behind the world,
In shadows where the time refuses to move,
But on that one day,
At midnight,
He steps into the world of the living
Parading off his army of
Unconscious believers that the human eye
Is blind towards
He reaps for his job,
For no single being can resist,
His gentle frozen touch.
Black is the absence of white.
Night is the absence of daylight.
Death is the absence of life.
Light was frozen,
Dead.
The sun had forgotten how to smile.
Sunlight was no longer warm.
It was frozen.
It was dead.
So were the eyes of those who starred upon
The earth covered with an elaborate carpet of
Bleeding corpses,
Rotting as time skipped over them.
Rivers bleed crimson,
Tears turn red,
As winds unknown to the human eye,
Chant the ruins of human song.
This is a time of terror,
This is a time,
When chaos turned black.
Hand in hand,
Gun with gun,
Shoot down the enemy,
Conquer for your country,
They bribed us with the concept of elusive bravery.
“all’s fair in love and war,” whispered the wailing faces.
Light was frozen,
Dead.
The sun forgot how to shine,
The clouds forgot how to cry.
“this is peace,” declared the priests of terror.
Soldiers fall like flowers,
Dirtied and bloodied-
Pink and red.
Their faces all the same,
Their eyes frozen,
Pleading for an escape.
The same haunting smile,
Their skin, pale and white-
Snow-like.
“this is life,” declared the priests of terror.
Films of daylight and midnight,
Sail across the oceans of time,
As the bells of the past summers,
Echo in worn whispers.
Light was frozen,
Dead.
A ghost
Surrendering its pride to its dark victor,
As the soul deserts the body,
Torn to shreds,
Shattered like the glass pieces
Scattered across the floor.
God is dead.
Good is dead.
Did it even exist in the first place?
All that existed was the human mind.
What did not kill it was good and what did was bad.
God is Bad.
God is Dead.
God killed the human mind when he created Humanity.
He made his children bleed.
He made them argue with fists, blades and bullets.
He created the art of war.
He created war to be kind.
Humans were born to be torn apart,
To be bled as pigs and treated as dogs.
God killed humanity when he created it.
He hated Adam.
He despised Eve.
He created the virtue of slaughter.
He created the worship of war.
He created the virtue of torture.
God is bad.
God is dead.
God is dead.
Good is dead.
Did it even exist in the first place?
All that existed was the human mind.
What did not kill it was good and what did was bad.
God is Bad.
God is Dead.
We’re all born sinners.
All sinners go to Hell.
So how does it matter what we do?
Take a life,
Spare one,
Create one-
It just doesn’t matter any longer.
We’re all born sinners.
All sinners go to hell.
Yes, you heard me right.
I met Satan, Lucifer too actually.
They taught me the art of warfare.
The art to kill
The precise skill to take a life and enjoy it
It really is an ordinary job.
Everyone is eligible.
That’s why they recruited for the war,
Snatching away the youth and time
From the hearts of the living
And trust me,
They have a strict no discrimination policy.
It is really not all that bad
You get to steal the lives of your enemies-
You get paid for that too.
‘It’s the best job I ever had’
And they’re not joking around.
They play with guns and dance to
The music of the shattering shells,
On a dance floor of shattered skulls and bones.
They dance with death.
And those who he rejects return,
Scarred for life,
Alive on the fringes of society like starving wolves
Always craving for another drop of human blood.
But it is alright.
We’re all born sinners.
All sinners go to Hell.
Nothing has changed.
Knives tore flesh apart.
Knives were stained with blood.
Knives tore us apart.
Today the same knife is a bullet,
shot from a gun-
one trigger, one finger, one thought.
“blood lust, blood gore, blood sabotage
what more do you want?
blood enemies, pick up the knife,
shoot the bullet. end the universe tonight,”
At one point, this was the language of adults.
Today, this is the dialect of childhood.
Oscar Wilde once said,
“Every man must kill the thing he loves,”
Nothing has changed.
Shoot the bullet.
End the universe tonight.
Follow the light.
Don’t bother putting up a fight.
After all, you did know-
Satan is always right.
The sun never rose that day.
It only set.
The dusk never came that day.
Only tides of blurred faces of the dead.
The shadows didn’t lurk anymore,
The wind ceased to blow,
The ice wouldn’t freeze anymore,
The rivers refused to flow.
The earth was stained red-
Stained with the blood of miscalculation and failure,
Tainted by the stink of rotting corpse
And echoing the damned footsteps of an expected hell.
Eyes didn’t flutter open,
Valentine’s day was forgotten,
Christmas became the celebration of the dead
And people starved, even past their death bed.
The air echoed the voice of the forgotten faces-
The abandoned children playing in tanks,
The aging man deafened by the demented orchestra of shells
The shrieks of women stuck in a permanent hopeless horror
and the gold-clad minister smiled as he hissed for the world to see,
“welcome to hell,”
Gifts were guns,
The infant leaves grew ruby red as yellow and orange-
The symphonies of glee,
Melted away into the river of severed heads.
The sun glared, annoyed and disgusted.
The moon screamed in haunting silence
As the last beating heart finally stopped,
Frozen at last.
The sun never rose that day,
It only set.
The dusk never came that day.
Only the severed limbs of the orphaned dead.
Its full.
Its all filled.
Traditionally, Frejya and the Valkyrie picked up the bravest off the battlefield and escorted them to Valhalla.
The ancien regime died with the French revolution.
When the bullet rips through the ripe flesh of the adolescent teenager who was cheated by society and forced into war,
There I s no redemption.
“Keep calm and carry on,”
That’s all you can do.
There is no escape.
Societies destroyed, families shattered, shards of bone and severed limbs.
The soil is scarlet. Crimson. Red basically.
When the bullet rips through the muscle of the beating heart into two, that’s it.
Death overcomes you.
Don’t fear her. Let her take you. She makes life so much sweeter.
It’s a culture dedicated to warfare.
After all, torture is a form of communication.
This is not bravery. It is insanity.
Valhalla is for the brave, not for the insane.
The ancien regime died with the Russian Revolution.
Heaven died when humanity was born.
Stained with the blood of a thousand years-
Today and yesterday are slaves already. Tomorrow’s next.
The sun-
A golden arc that once represented the hopes and desires of an ever rising empire.
It’s now a floating nuclear bomb and the lazy cotton clouds are the white silk shrouds, concealing the haunting innocent faces who simply couldn’t get away- collateral damage.
Yes, that’s what we call them.
The winds- I imagine them to be giant silver sickles sharpened to slice into two equal parts and I imagine they’d do it with a gleeful grin.
Then, comes rain-
Showers of bullets fired from metallic cylinders-
lethal extensions of humanity, invented by the Chinese, adopted and improved by the Europeans.
“there will come soft rains,”
that’s what they all chant , praying for water to wash away the horror and sins of the battlefield.
Rain comes, but in no means soft.
A shower of bullets and grenades, of severed limbs and droplets of blood sprayed all over the sky, staining the earth permanently. Even if a thousand flowers, red, white and yellow bloom next spring, in their petals, the horrors of the previous year will never vanish.
Can’t you hear the echo of the voices?
the wailing children, the screaming men, the shrieking women.
Can’t you hear the silent wails of the trees whose roots are shattered by the incessant attack of the storm of grenades?
Can’t you hear the silent protest when buildings older than a decade of generations are blown up?
The earth is stained with the blood of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The skies are burning.
The skies are on fire.
The orchestra of birds chirping early in the morning-
My 3 am alarm clock that repeats every few minutes. I can’t even reach out to slam it into a much desired state of snooze because this particular alarm clock is privileged enough to have wings that it flaps, flying for hours a day, covering a million times more than what I could even dream of doing on foot. At 3 am, it is already succeeded in making me feel inferior.
I wake up, officially this time, at 8 or 9 am,
“A respectable hour of the morning” as my mother would off course say. Any time later, even if it is just a few minutes past “the morning”, she would automatically classify it as afternoon, according to her watch off course. Naturally, the world follows a much more reliable system of the GMT, according to which, all time before midday is morning. Regardless, I’m awake- if by “awake” you mean the wonderfully dazed state of mind, where I float, halfway between the conscious and sub-conscious realms of my mind, drifting without a single care, watching the world and its events pass by my eyes- blurred, like the images I see from the window of my car. It’s the state for the rest of my day of course.
Morning becomes noon, which transitions to afternoon and then dusk. Or twilight. Whatever you prefer to call it. I know it as evening. Is it only me who finds it odd that 4 words describe one particular time of the day? How beautifully odd really. It’s why I love this language. Each day is a scavenger hunt for new words. Join me sometime. Hunting alone gets terribly lonely don’t you think? Besides, two arrows would hit wider targets right?
Have you ever noticed the skies at dawn and dusk? When I was a child, I thought the skies were stained with candy. I wanted some. I wanted to grow tall enough so that my fingers would grab those cotton-candy clouds, tall enough that I could stick my tongue out and lick the candy stained skies and the giant crimson lollypop floating in the sky. My grandmother heard of this. She didn’t laugh. I spent a large part of my childhood, deceived into drinking milk twice a day, along with curd and all my vegetables and whatever was given to me on my plate for my meals- breakfast, lunch and dinner, in hopes and expectations that I would be that tall one day. I obviously did not. What did happen was that I grew out of my innocent daze of childhood where I viewed the world through my rose-tinted glasses that made the world seem like a wonderful utopia. That is childhood.
I’m no longer a child. Now, the skies at dawn and dusk are on fire in my eyes. The infant rays of the sun pierce the darkness, bringing light. But it isn’t white. Its fire- a demented orchestra of yellow, red, orange and pink- screams echoing, bombs exploding, guns firing. The sky is a battlefield, stained with the blood of those who dare to step foot on it.
The sun rays are like the rain of bullets fired from a gun- revolvers and what not. A gun is a gun and the moment a person holds it, he becomes lethal. The bullet pierces through the young flesh of the innocent teenager who they bribed into fighting for them. A soldier is a pawn to them. Yes them, the ones who sit in their offices, sipping their expensive coffees from their white china cups, leaning back on their leather chairs, swirling around, swimming in their shroud of smoke, high up on floors with double digits. Soon it will be triple won’t it? To them, a soldier is a pawn. They forget, a soldier is a child of someone- a farmer, a laborer, or maybe some innocent teenager who’s lost enough to think that army life would be like a game of Call of Duty. No it won’t. There’s no pause button. Once the bullet rips through the flesh and shatters the heart, life is over once and for all.
Wasn’t it Stalin who said, “One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic?”
I can’t recall exactly. I read it a while back, off the surface of a book whose name I can’t recall. Perhaps I read it in school, or perhaps I read it while I performed my daily ritual of surfing the internet. Regardless, to them, this applies. War is a board game. A soldier is a piece- a faceless piece whose death means absolutely nothing. The point of the game is money. The one who earns the most wins money is land. That’s all that matters. Only one can win and when that happens, the battle ends. The war never does.
The battle ends. The fighting ends. Cities ruined. Cultures and histories insulted and destroyed mercilessly. People dead- on both sides, and innocent spectators who just couldn’t get away in time and got sucked into hell and never survived to explain how bad it really was. Nevertheless, it’s a grim victory but a victory nonetheless. Thus, the skies that previously burned of war and reeked of the scent of rotting bodies transition into the calm blue, almost white really. That shade stays for the rest of the day until evening when the skies burn again. That’s how wars are fought really. There’s always a moment of calmness which is forgotten, absolutely ignored when the first bullet is fired once again.
Evening turns to night. Black. Actually, its midnight blue. Or Prussian. I don’t know. I didn’t really pay attention in art class as you can see. Either way, it is just dark you know? Its the absence of color all together. But that, I will see that shade again and I’m going to think its various shades of the same color but it won’t be. It would be ripples of black satin that I will see before my eyes for the next 7 or 8 hours as darkness fills the crevasses of my mind that would be normally reserved for dreaming. But my sleep is vacant, dreamless- just the way I like it.
After all, silent solitude is always appreciated
kairos 