J'accuse

What do the people that obey the system think of? Do they even care about the final outcome of things? Do morals even exist for them?

I am a ghost, a being made of the shadows, contained within the emptiness of the silence, whispering from the gutters, forgotten by all, remembered only by the beeps of morse and the cracking of the radio. I am the dark void and the sun’s light, I am the empty poet and the mad hatter. And here I stand before you, the mind and the body, in the flesh, while you drown the truth in the synthetic worlds projected onto the sterile screen, biding your time, wasting away, the plastic grave open and waiting for you, complete with the plastic men and women who weep carbon tears, forgetting you the moment they cover you in dirt. Maybe you’ll find real friendship amidst the worms and the roots. And here we are, as a species, at the very brink of extinction, our endless tanks and our endless armies tearing scars and craters in the earth’s surface, and yet, you sit there, taking drugs, eating away at your own filth, writhing in the corpses of a million children, a million bodies, their empty, cold eyes starved of sunlight, the grey skin pulled taut at their bones, filled with worms and wounds all attesting to the horror and screaming at you in mad bewilderment. And suddenly, you feel insulted. How dare I, a mere idiot, a nobody, not deserving of your mere presence, how dare I question you and your motives? How dare I point out that you are nothing but a rat, a filthy fat rat, comfortable within your own diseased and rotten shell, devoid of any moral or purpose?

Well take your damn television and your synthetic people and your plastic children, take your carbon tears and your destroyed, ruined souls, take your damn, filthy, brutal world, and by jove, leave me alone. Go, go and listen to the damn pictures, listen to the people who speak without a face, whose voice comes through a million wires and a million circuits, go and eat your poison and drink your arsenic, go and sit there, in the darkness, amidst the holograms, go and watch the curtains burn, the walls crash upon your mortal body, go and watch it all decay and while all the plastic melts, while all the carbon disappears, think of the world, think of the dead and think of the ones who have never loved you and who have left you alone, to rot here, and by god, think of what you did to stop it.

***

Slowly, the black waves take back what always belonged to them, the old fishing ships leering in the harbours, tilted towards the dying flame on the horizon. With every coming tide their lives shorten, time ticks by, the rust falls into the sea and the sea falls into the burning sun. A dark wind blows, the cities falling, falling into the abyss, crushed by the rocks, disintegrating into mere dust, metal strikes metal, the sparks flying forth. Time is an unforgiving entity, cold and distant. It rampages through our lives, through our hopes and dreams, ravaging our bodies, eating away the daylight, carving markings into the rocks by the riverbanks until nothing is left but the leering fishing boats. Time is elliptical, an infinite cycle of repetition, biting at the foundations of mankind, slowly pushing the car towards the cliff, cutting the brake lines and with a vicious push, a striking finality, the last crescendo begins, the symphony of bones and flame singing songs of an imagined future, a world that can never exist. We are nothing but our own enemy. We are dust, distant and faint, dancing the dance of ages, the dance of lives and the dance of memories, ultimately settling somewhere, the rain eventually wiping it away, our names encased in sand, not in marble.

And where are you? Well, you are in the back seat of the car, under the influence of the arsenic, the poison running through your veins, the radio on and the curtains aflame with the resentment of a thousand lonely victims. You can stop the car, you can turn the wheel and you can end the brutality, you can open the windows and let the sun in, you can stop it all before it’s too late. And yet, the car is still moving, approaching the cliff at an alarming rate. And you still do nothing, the edge now in plain view. You still sit there and bury your mind and your soul beneath a billion empty pill bottles, beneath a billion dollars, and beneath the sea of your own wretchedness. oh, you do not worry, there is no reason to. Why should you? There’s the chauffeur, he’s making sure that all goes well and according to plan. Yes, yes, the chauffeur, he’s in the front. He worries, I don’t. No, let him do all the worrying, yes, let the ones in control do all the worrying. No, not me, I’m not worried.

And then, in a flash, just as one set of drugs wears off and another kicks in, you see something out of the corner of your eye, something odd and out of place.

There’s no driver at the wheel.