"Take Up Arms in this, Your Holiest Cause"

#0027. Artifacts and holy words are enough to survive in a dreary landscape, but when those things are lost to time, when logic supplants them, then you are stuck with nothing. There is convenience in science. There is quality increased. There is a better, sleeker place. But what drips out like fat from meat is something harder to enumerate. You lost your holy words, and without them, you're unsure of how to progress to the next world. You might even say that that would be impossible.

"Idamae"

#0028. Oh you think you are safe. Idamae will shake you from that notion. She will grab you by your throat and pull out every whisper of hope you might harbor. Look in. Idamae will shake you to your rotten little core. She is ancient. Idamae will shake your bones loose from your tangle of skin.

"Loose Ends Meet Loose Ends"

#0029. This is the morning he woke in prison. Flawed design and failure. Snap the photograph. All walls crumble. All cinder blocks tumble. He woke in prison and felt, maybe, for the first time, safe. Apart from Alice. Apart from Idamae. The prisoner looks around and his cell is quiet and it is safe. He crumples like paper. He will wait here for expiration.

"An Attempt to Build a New World of Logic and Order"

#0030. In ashes colored by bodily humors he draws out the pyramid. In ashes colored by bodily humors he trisects the pyramid into three new pyramids. The equality is pleasing. The order is satisfying. Each branch is its own color. It is a set of prisms. A new world order upon which to build his lonely city. It is derided as mere triangles. He sees it as something more substantial.

"Hurtle"

#0031. Waking up to this every night. The White Void abandonment of flesh. Each supplicant standing on the brink. He or she will hurtle themselves into it. And one by one, they are stripped to the bone, screaming out in agony. The White Void is the End of everything. If I had a time machine, I would hurtle myself to this point to watch the parade of supplicants skeletonized and bared.

"Beauty in Every Cup of Ash"

#0032. Overwhelmed sometimes by the ability of people to just exist. I watch movements under glass magnifiers, like a scientist with bacteria on a glass plate. They move with such distinct need and wonder. Holding the hands of innocent little children. Pausing to bend and pet a puppy. They distract each other with kind words and sweet compassion. And then the ringing in my ears starts up again. Do not worry. Do not worry. Do not worry. All I can do is worry. And even this makes me so sad.

"The Return and the Adjustment"

#0033. Find this. Find you well. Find all of this better than I could have left it. She does not qualify. She does not wonder about you any more. This day I don't give a damn about her. But those are the lies that weasel up my stomach and bore holes into my gut. The ants are running the show now that the maggots have left the scene. Her special day is long gone. I am left behind like always.