With a fist full of smoke we dance around the bonfire, aloud with the sounds of our own revelling in the fecal matter projected onto the shifting sands. The smoke dissipates but slowly and the burning curtain is lifted off the stage, doused weakly by the tears of our regret.
The paranoia sets in as we rake the dirt again and again, prevailing only to set ablaze our feet with the whisper of blisters, the agony of our diminishing return to the path visited beforehand.
Within the crevasses of our minds we dig for the treasure we lost but never had. We dig in scores, throngs of people hiding behind that falsehood of a shared treasure. As one we reduce ourselves to simple statements of shared misery, seemingly only to alleviate our suffering while pertaining our innermost desire for greed and welfare.
Our nails are broken and the dirt is clawing away at our skin. The worms howl in disbelief as we forcefully relocate their aerated soil.
Moisten your eyes with the agony of realisation that futility rules your every whim. Fall back onto your knees and repent in the sight of your own undoing. Failure, sweet failure, is the name we speak into the wind, the name we give our children as we fill their heads with dreams and possibilities, with demands, regrets, expectations and boundaries.
Failure.
The war-drums of our constipated ideals sound alive in the stale air of our hive. Like drones we hide behind the walls we built, walls of glass, walls of doors. Nothing is private any more, none may hide the slightest facet of their inner self for fear of being rejected. The wrecking ball that tears through our pre-set survival instincts knocks on the door and tells you that you are walking a path that leads to ostracism. The eviction from social paradise once more.
We are our own heresy, uniformly disagreeing to whatever purpose we laid out before our children’s eyes. Demanding our progeny to mix in the values of that proclaimed society as we try so badly to hide ourselves from the prying eyes around us. The solitude we deny the next only to make it our own.
The paranoia grows. We allow ourselves to become digitalised, recorded and processed in the mechanical eye of the beholder; turning around only when we notice we are beset by the eyes of commerce, used for purposes we avoided to recognise. Again it grows as we thrust the ones around us into the mingle, the mix of others, as we expose them to all that we know exists already. Regret is my middle name as I introduce myself once more, as I speak the words imprinted on my digital mortality. The outcome is welded onto the foundations of my own paranoia, my own solitude. My downfall will be the adherence to the things written on my body; a paranoid solitude its reward.
Yet still it is exactly that fear; the solitude and following paranoia, that get us to become ousted, cast out from the ideas and ideals that surround us all. We are told, taught, forced, to interact. For the sake of our sanity. “Being alone is not a good thing; you will not make it out there on your own.”
One cannot see the inherent evils of the hive, the mass, when standing in the centre, participating without a say in things. The bigger issue, the whole puzzle – limited to the parts our mind can encompass – cannot be seen from the middle of things.
The solitude allows you to see, observe, through the distance of a bound will, what direction the storm is shifting in. We continue to dance to what we think are primal rhythms, wielding the fires we worship like the hill tribes and cavemen, unable to see the sinking sand barring down on a course of destruction, shifting our pace and direction with but a grain of sand at a time.
The smallest of crystalline matter moves as we revel in the freedom we worked so hard to get; the lie we desperately need to be able to cope with the dooming reality of our own stupidity. We are only as free as we are told to be, as we are told we are. Nothing more we can ever attain without being told that it is the very pinnacle of freedom; of desire and the way to live. We introduce ourselves to the ways of slavery – both to society and to ourselves – only to be able to rebel against them when the unforeseen consequences finally do catch up with our dance.
We dance hand in hand, toe to toe, and cast the outcast a glance of disinheritance from our utopia of rebellion. We claim ourselves free while hammering the chains around our ankles and eyes. Pay no heed to the lone figure standing on the crest of the dune, overlooking our progress into the sinking soil; it knows not of the freedom we celebrate. It is but one of the misguided ones, lost in its own sense of disagreement.
The worms have grown. Their tunnels devour the cores of planets, their path the clash of tectonic powers. On its back rides the lie we chose not to see. The rider commands and the worm obeys. Failure is the breath we smell before it rends our flesh.
The stranger on the dune has but to turn to face another group. Another rebellion, another set of ideals, so unique they have become exactly like every other one it has seen. In the end, it is only an observer. Change comes where it is begotten.
In its solitude it hears paranoia whisper. It whispers of the cause and the effect. It whispers of prophecy and prodigy. It whispers in screams.
Miserably Miserable 