The Ravens are Gathering

The ravens are gathering. Jackboots crash on polished squares. Iron clatter of battle-shod horses over wooden slats. Cross stiff flatts, flaxen meadows and sunken marshlands. Watched by hooded shapes high on castle walls. Black turrets pierce tense, sullen skies.

In the courtyard, more and more ravens make landfall. Dead-eyed, tattered fans and swirls. Stilt-walkers, frog-steppers, poker-face wood-peckers. Determined worm-pickers.

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Donnie is overheating. Warms to his psycho-social polemic. Begins to grow monstrous. Transforms. Deforms. Cruelly, smiles. Sparkles tyrannical. Flexes monstrous increase. Assumes, inhabits. Heaves and thrashes telescopic articulations of metal tentacles. Welcomes the upward, outward surge of cyborg power. Winding tighter and tighter, against, against, against.

Roars and spasms. Rises high over dwarfish humans. Tiny brains: witless, careless creatures. Fly specks: swat them, swat them, snuff them out. Spirals wildly, further out.

Stands collosal. High above Pandemonium. Unfurls gigantic, sleek Dark Angel wings. Steps out super-sheathed in metal scales. The new Black Star. Epic, titanic. Onto the threshold. Liminal. Teeters tense points on the edge of cold black space. Grey cloud-wraiths curl around mighty, monumental feet.

Ready for the final step. Leaden skyfall to thumping brake, jagged rise and silent glide through cold, breathless nightmare realms to protean cosmic outer distances. Beyond the birth of heaven and hell.

Are you OK?

Calm down.

Just sit down.

The spell is broken. Gretchen calls him back. Back from the edge. Shrinks him back to human size. Restores. Resumes his human shape. Warm blood, heart restarts.

To know somebody cares. 

Why should not old men be mad?

Why should not old men be mad? Asks a desperately young school teacher, high-wire walking, juggling and tumbling, melting to a puddle beneath the thudding glare of the dumb, disciplined rows; permanently first night nervous, scrutinised, ridiculed, and spat upon by fools.

Poor boy volunteers his living body to be surgically dismantled pre-mortem in the modern teaching laboratory, where he is reduced to a thumped down lump of human meat, his skin rolled off like a white rubber stocking, his soft flesh sliced with knives, and beaten into flat, manageable chunks by blind dumbbell fists.

Go back and see. How the same shy boy stands so very small beside the teacher's table, and suffers Mr McDermott's wordless disapproval. How his maths book pulsates with tiny circus tumblers, beat groups and pop whistlers, and how the pages skip by to the zigzag rhythms of their madcap adventures. How he sits hunched in public humiliation and rubs out all the fun.

Shamed by his inadequacy, his inability to stay within the thin blue lines or succumb to the pull of the squat, square stacking chairs, his Great Soul shrinks beneath the burden of the modern scientific methods. His boyish beauty spoiled, his tenderness trashed, he is ritually rendered down to nothing by false teeth leering, jaundiced, gormenghastly monsters. Angrily scribbled headmasters pursue him down nightmare corridors, while squads of clown-shod crows in pink sparkle crash hats peck at his sacred heart. 

And in response to routine savagery, he makes his saintly smile: to keep everything nice, to smooth with hospital corners his way through the polished pale corridors of the grey stone asylum. He turns the other cheek, opens his ivory palms for the nails. The lump hammers thud, and then the thumping spasm as blood bursts and gushes into cold, white sinks, courses along rattling troughs, and gurgles down creaking, lurching pipes.

As he suffers. As he suffers ...

Please. No more tears, no more sad eyes, father-forgive-them sighs. Don’t let these small town, cruel, ignorant fuckers take your precious youth and beauty. 

For God’s sake, Sebastian. At least, try to avoid the fucking arrows!

And, of course, he doesn't try to avoid the arrows. He just stands there like a dope and takes it. Worse - he carries his own bow and arrows, his own wood and nails: to save his tormentors any inconvenience. 

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There was a boy ... a very strange, enchanted boy ... they say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea ... a little shy and sad of eye ... and very wise was he ... and then one day, one magic day, he passed my way ... and while we spoke of many things ... fools and kings ... this he said to me ... the greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return ...

Nature Boy (Eden Ahbez)

 [...] it seemed David would always offer a hand to hold, to help him with the pain. O loved David. And then one day, he was gone.

On the train one dark November morning, O hears David’s voice once more on the radio. Somewhere between stations the crackling becomes clearer, and - unmistakably - there he is, transmitting from distances: ‘I want to live; I want to live; I want to live’. 

And he doesn't know which way is up, and the needle spins madly, and the lonely girl at the front of the carriage turns to see his brown eyes fill with tears [...]