Lord of the Scabland

Out on the scablands there is a man walking and he won’t ever stop. Around him are bones, half buried, skin sun-blackened and stretched, stomachs yawning, and in his hand is a sword, the selfsame weapon that slew every one of those bodies. The metal is old, speckled and pitted, chipped some from its wielding, but clean. He walks without destination or other purpose, his feet stumbling, sword always about to slip from his hand. He looks about him, he is constantly looking about him, searching the barren stone cut vista. If he sees you he will heft his weapon and begin to run, his eyes never leaving your face. You may flee before him but in his mind he holds every detail of the land and you will not elude him. You may shoot him down as he approaches, but he will rise up like some vengeful lazarus and strike you down regardless. If you choose to fight him he will see it in you before even you are fixed on the notion and he will honor you for it. Whatever weapon you choose he will match you and circle, marking out an arena in that dry caked dirt, a furrow scraped with his heel from which fire will burst as he completes his circuit, and if you cross it you will die. He will bow before you and will not move until you do the same, and then he will spar with you, testing your strength and your speed and if you can subdue him the fire will die and you will go free but no man yet has done so and he is riddled with scars and bullet holes, and no blood even drains from him anymore and no sweat is ever on his brow. He is dry as the sage of which he makes his bed under the wheeling stars and if he feels pain from the blows he receives he does not show it.
He is the lord of aridity and suzerain of the wastes. He is the authority on which the place is built and none walk but in his knowledge. He is not God, for even gods he had laid low, and those that rule do so by his leave.
Yet the sword he carries is older nearly even than he and on it is inscribed the names of the Titans that once wielded it. Uranus who first forged it from the coldness of deep heaven, Iapetus who took it up after his brother’s patricide, Menoetius who bore it into Tartarus and gave it to Attila when he visited with Mars and Hades and conspired to raze Rome as a sacrificial pier. Attila though, it betrayed when he turned from his divine task and the man who would be lord slew him with the jawbone of a warhorse and took the sword as his own. It has as many names as he who wields it but may no man say it is the sword of Mars or even of Uranus, for it belongs to him, and always did. In his mind was coldness first conceived and he knew the sky god when the heavens were young.
Somewhere on the highest plateau is his throne and in winter he sits upon it and looks out over his dominion. He is the judge and all that do judge do so by his dispensation, by his words are their judgements made real and in his mind only are they reconciled, all the judgements of men. From his mouth come constantly words and his speech is written in the sands of the desert and the ice of the mountains nearly as it is spoken and not a word is mistranscribed for his voice is the very forming of the dust.



yes, i have been reading McCarthy again

Lent

Sometimes in winter it is cold and
I do not wear a coat to feel the wind and its chill and it is
Difficult to not be paralyzed, but I
Hate it (the paralysis) enough I force myself to walk untouched
You see,
The cold is only what you make of it
And if you wish it to be gone, it will be so.

Sometimes I see myself in a mirror and
I don’t recognize my face, it is strange
And foreign and I
Feel as though it, the sight in the glass, is not me
Like I have just woken up and I can not remember what the dream and what before it
I love those moments and I hate them too, reminders that I
Don’t know the look of reality, that my mind is linked to the extant
World through organs of tissue, that
At any time I could awaken and find
All of this gone, and myself a child again,
Free to the morning light.

But this is a slumbrous hope and an childish dread, all that is seen -
Too minutely logical to be a vision and my
Rest too shallow to harbor such revelations of
Bliss and terror
The music always familiar, time passing slowly in the late night.

I see you and I
Wonder at your neurotic pitted elegance
If I am to be alone all my life then I am dead already and
Falling to sheol as I write

In my dream you were sleeping and I took you into my arms
And I whispered into your ear that I love you,
Your mind and your body and your soul, but
Then I walked to the ocean and laid
You in a cave for the rising tide to carry away … because sometimes in winter–