…where the hell were you, then, when my skull’s blood was feeding the concrete?
Where were you when they tired of me, when they struck my face, plucked my words from my mouth, struck my words from the record? Or when I sat bloodied and dazed and nerve-damaged, afraid that my mind would never return because of another’s impatience, and knowing I lost all the joy in the world I would ever have? Where were you? when they dishonoured everything dear to me I had been foolish enough to show them at all. When death and violence and treachery surrounded me like a cloud of biting flies for a year? Where were you when I needed support?
Were you standing there, speechless, accepting, perhaps? Well, some of you were, very literally; others – I do not know, distracted or otherwise occupied – see, here is the thing – I scarcely even care anymore. I will not carry the weight of my friendships, my loves, on my own; I will stay alone always, because it certainly is not lost on me how quickly almost everyone vanished from my life the minute I STOPPED doing it, and because we do not live in a culture where reciprocity seems at all sane. And I cannot believe anyone now. And I only see victims and victimizers, a diverse line of modular Stepford plugins, and a customer base for every kind manufactured. No counterculture but only subcultures lined up as choirs of angels around a hollow sun and perfectly content with it. My feet are firmly grounded again in the qlippothic side of the world.

And I wanted much more; much nobler things. Dear hearts, I truly believed, to my bones, that you wanted them too, and believed, and I honoured you for it. You know I would have done anything for you, and sometimes I did, for some of you reading this now, I imagine. But you always were hesitant things; you always did sort of keep one foot in class envy while the other danced social justice convincingly, and you never did want to risk too much, to dive into terra incognita transfigured by holy terror and faith. So how can you ask that of anyone else? Why should I? Why is that my burden alone? Simply because it makes me die NOT to? Well, we are all dying now, and the joy of life is many years gone, for me. And I got used to chronic emotional pain, fear, predation, and perdition so very young indeed, you know. I cannot accept that Destiny’s vanquished my Will, but my eyes nonetheless do roll back in my head as Its tepid hand holds my throat against the bare boards. It is not so mouldy here as there but I still smell it faintly. As I am sure you can too if you take a moment.

The bones of the mountain, the hiss of our cruel mother sea, they are better friends to me now than ever you were my fellow conscious beings, who could be so much more. This is cold comfort; this is not how it should be. But if I cannot be certain who I can trust with what after two or five or fifteen years, I suppose that is simply a place I can never in good faith stand, with anyone.

And where AM I now; where have I gone and where shall I go? Do I want you to know? Because nowhere is safe from the tainted & whimsical gaze of your masquerade camera eyes, your stupid chickenshit one-way mirrors. You hunt tamer, younger, easier prey, now; you shun and you spurn and defile our memory, but there you are, still, wherever I go. Whatever you have had to say about the places I love in the past. You are (t)here. You haunt them with your treasonous flesh, your lying smiles, your practised theatre of love, your counterfeit politics. Politely-rapacious tourists slumming it down in the underworld, dazzled by the allure of liberation you dare not pay for, and as such become broken thereby, walking half-assed perversions of the true meaning of liberty, of troth, of weal. Enslavers and deceivers of yourselves & each other. Do I want you to see me or hear me? Keep my name out yr mouth and yr eyes. Real intimacy is not a thing to be bartered at all, and I feel utterly sick to ever have shared it in earnest again, to have been reminded how little that is worth.

I am not an empty confession booth – go masturbate somewhere else. Go be insincere together elsewhere. Go fill your wounds uselessly with hotdogs and with oysters and diamond dust, septic with negligence, festering under apocryphal moons. Go carve yourselves up into pointless museum-booths in a fundraiser for things you used to decry. Grow fat on the tepid milk of the mediocre; hatch little dreamlets who will grow to dislike you as I do, propagate broken dynasties hamstrung by things you have failed to transcend. You will have no more of my soul now, you sellouts, hypocrites. You who would claim kinship by day and leave me to the wolves in my darkest hour, who would condone or support people who you have watched lie to me, exploit me, betray my trust in word and deed, knowingly do me harm via acts of their own will, erase me to ease their own guilt… you who would forge a new clan of what should rightly be your collective shame, who would DARE to fault ME for withholding forgiveness to make it EASIER for YOU because I AM somehow EVER SO SELFISH. There is no neutrality here, nor room for forgiveness. I am done.

Do I want anyone to remember? No comment; no matter; it is already over; I am already gone. I watch from beneath and I will curse you forever in silence.

but what have I ever freely given that,
in the end, has not proven a fruitless waste,
a barren? waste-
land. dead tree. hollow scaffolding,
a blueprint of a lifeless fig,
unbeating heart,
…as these dry crusts of self now seem to me as well.