The Human Abstract (340)

The prince's walls are near, and before the gates six thousand slaves revolve around millstones that may or may not move something in the nether depths: but as I watch them I would stake my life on those grinding wheels turning the slaves themselves, like puppets in chains.

Brightness hovers near me, and opening my mouth I let them count my teeth. My mind swims deliriously in the narrow path of the seeping light, the light that seems to flow through my being: that seems to have at its core the depth of my mouth, and the light gently brimming.

Then I am bereft, and the ochre colours rush like breath back into my body, encasing me. I take up the next piece of iron and pierce my thigh through with it. The pain is intense - the spear seems to nestle within the broken shards of iron welted into the rasping wounds, each sealed with the heat like rosebuds blooming inwards within me.

I look up to where Jesus sways on high Golgotha, directing thousands of us with the spear he has torn from his skeletal side. It is only my abject mind that fuses me to him and the fires that burn under his gaunt brow. Sometimes I think that he is weeping, and it is the lights they have shone upon him that make the tears dance like flame. Such is the narrow angle of my heart. I look up again and he is gone.

This is the human abstract: we below haunt ourselves to chase ghosts from the blesséd, and it is on us that they must test their weapons, so useless against unflawed skin. Within my roots, there is an ecstasy of weakness, and in that weakness there is the Word. My body bangs within its hollow trunk, for my thoughts are trapped beneath its shades. But oh, heed my fruits, fear my fruits. They are soft enough to break your mouth open and split your entire being down to its last unblemished sliver.