traditions

This world is a giant machine, sometimes wicked, often vibrant, mostly wonderful and always violent, even with cogs so rusted a tooth has broken off and jammed the gears. Two decades, I've been literate, an artisan of language craft and a long-time wordsmith critic. But even with the millions of pages that have passed these and hands after all these years, words do me no favors now as I struggle to describe how deep it hurts to hold a body you can't feel, kiss lips and eyelids you can't call your own when the lights are off, and the syllables they summon you with, carelessly invoking powers they don't recognize like irresponsible magicians, charlatans that should know enough to be ashamed.

I swear, I will make them know. Return with their heads on pikes like souvenirs, not just for you and me but for all the countless disembodied mouths who were denied a chance to speak, to press themselves on someone else's and relish feeling weak. I will bring them back here on their knees and make them watch us love each other until they go mad from the knowledge of their mistake.

I will scream your name into my hands, press the sound between my palms and crush it from coal to diamond to a black hole resting at the heart of a white dwarf star before I unleash it on the whole world, where it will resonate through billions of skulls and everyone around you will simply see you as you are: sweet smile spreading across your face, cheeks blushing with with radiant intimacy of filling your chest with the ether around you that means you're still alive, eyes glazed over with the glory of watching your hands manifest the echoes the voices that have touched you deepest. We did not declare this war, nor stock the arms to fight it. We simply bore the hearts and minds that question why we hurt ourselves, to find what's wrong and right it.