Deleted

Like falling leaves
Or deleted subroutines
Thoughts just for you
Drop away from me




originally written 10/27/2013

When The Clouds Part, My Heart Wants

The sun is slowly moving
The clouds are swiftly blowing
The day is quickly going

My thoughts and mind are roving
My heartbeat isn't slowing
My wants I've trouble knowing

When life should be for loving
When interest is touching
When would I seek out nothing?

Egathel of the Nephilim

[This short story contains descriptions of graphic violence.]

He remembered when the earth was young. He could recall a time when the Nephilim roamed the earth, deathless and free, almost careless in their confidence.

That had been eons before they became cursed; before whatever it was that had caused their need for blood had changed them.

Not that they weren't a bloodthirsty enough lot in ancient times—they were, after all, surrounded by the savagery of ancient humans, in those days. Egathel himself believed that his own people would never have sullied themselves with so much violence, if they'd been left to their own devices. Perhaps the curse would not have fallen upon them, then.

But did not most thinking creatures view themselves with the same sort of biased hindsight? It mattered little, for such times and thoughts had long since passed.

This was not a lofty age of nobility, but a lowly one of parasitism: the powerful race of the Nephilim reduced to a breed of reclusive, humanoid mosquitoes. Leeches. Vampire bats. Yet they were more ferocious than any of those other blood-suckers; the parasite analogy served less well to illustrate their method of feeding than it did their current significance in the world: a barely-perceptible buzz in the night. A creature unable to thrive without lapping at the life force of another.

At this thought, Egathel had to remind himself that no animal was fundamentally different in that respect, though most were much less violent and more discriminating than his kind. He smiled a bare-toothed smile that would have chilled the blood of any who saw it, had there been anyone capable of seeing in the pitch darkness of his lair (and were it not the case that he would slaughter anything or anyone he encountered there).

Certainly his kind had power still, well beyond that of mere mortals, but what was it worth when they were addicted to death, cultureless and monstrous? What could you create when you had a constant craving—a thirst—to destroy and devour utterly the lives of all other beings, and nothing more than a gaping void where once there was a sense of pride and meaning?

He shuddered, recalling what he’d seen the change do to some of his companions. To call it insanity or depravity would have been euphemistic.

In many ways, there was some mercy in the utter loss of reason. It seemed to Egathel that he was trapped, tortured by memory; tortured by conscience and the knowledge that his was a broken people—and his a broken mind. For all he really knew, his comrades felt the same way beneath the apparent oblivion of intellect that was their ever-hungry façade.

To an onlooker, there was no reason in the creature that Egathel now was; his insight, though sharp, was beyond irrelevant. He knew that he could see his numerous defects, but also well knew he had no means to correct them. There was no reason to suspect his brethren were any different. 

There was only hunger, now. That was all that mattered.

And when he smelled it—human blood—three was nothing but frenzy. Oh, Egathel could remember everything that happened; relive in perfect, vivid detail what he did to each of his victims. Every bit of it was there in his memory, ready to be analyzed, agonized over, and paradoxically enjoyed. He wished he could stop himself from revisiting it, wished he could eliminate his flawless recall—just as he wished he did not take such perverse pleasure in his bloody actions—but he could not.

It was very little consolation that he still had a conscience. In actual fact, he was a monster. What happened in his mind made no difference whatever to those he had killed.

And yet he continued. Seemingly, he could not himself be killed. Immortality was his prison, he noted with an ironic appreciation for the terror of humans facing their deaths; something he’d become intimately familiar with.

If only human legends about supernatural creatures were true! Some alleged methods for killing vampires had worked on him, but only temporarily. It had been a surprise and a welcome respite, penance even, but never true release, never the end he sought.

Every time he would arise again after his body had healed; sometimes after years.

Beneath all of these rational thoughts and anguish about his existence, there was something else lurking in his mind. Deeper knowledge accumulated over the millennia, lapping like an ocean at the continent that was his true self, eroding it away, one grain of sand at a time.

How many trillions of moments would tick by before it succeeded in submerging him utterly?

Try to deny it as he might, deep in his heart where the poison had crept over the eons, he knew that what he did was not wrong. It was all too right. It was perfection; it was completeness; he knew this when he hunted, felt it in his every fiber.

The Nephilim had originally seen themselves as being above most other creatures and their petty struggles to survive and multiply, but there was ancient knowledge, wisdom as old as life itself that had begun to take over these attitudes, creeping further to the fore each time he fed.

Fed.

Truly, his people were completed by reincorporating this basic desire; they were baptized in blood, and it washed away the sin of their pretense, the stain of their arrogant presumption that they were somehow above the brutality of nature, above mortality.

This was the one fact that all life had always known— 

Feed. 

—Even the smallest creatures had to metabolize something else—

Feed.

—No creature on earth had ever turned up its nose to the idea of making some other creature a meal—

Feed!

—when it was truly hungry, except perhaps those physically incapable of it—

FEED.

—Like grass-eaters. Prey animals.

Prey.

It became too much for Egathel. The hunger had taken his last rational thoughts, subduing them to its own ends, forcing him to acknowledge the rightness of the violent impulse as he rose, his body responding to the need with a flood of exhilarating energy.

As was always the case, the rationalization was preceded by the urge.

Creeping at first from his lair, deep in the bowels of an ancient city buried beneath the pretended civility and abundant population of the modern age, soon he was running, leaping obstacles and bounding off of walls until he emerged, nearly flying, from a little-noticed hole in the side of a hill overlooking a disused factory. After he landed, stopping to sniff the night air, he froze; the moon was unexpectedly bright above him, exaggerating the pallor of his skin where his flowing, mangy, knotted cobweb hair was not draped over it.

Turning his head through an arc as he sniffed from left to right, he suddenly froze after making it halfway.

Human.

The hunt was on.

Into the city he charged at impossible speed, hair trailing behind him in this wind he made with his own remarkable power. Each footfall brought him closer to ecstasy; now past the factory, now through a vacant lot, over the chain link, chasing the invisible trail of a meal, senses keen and a cautious predator’s instinct apparent in the way he hugged the shadows and crept silently through the vegetation. No rational thoughts occupied the mind of this creature as it ran; it was pure being, pure experience; pure sense. The entire effort, though effortless, was a performance, an act as well practiced as the hunt was old.

There it was: a human male.

Saliva starting in anticipation, a slight tremor through the spine arced it into pounce-readiness as his torso was smoothly swept along by fluid limbs. Invisibly shadowed by trees and shrubs as the prey strobed impossibly slowly in and out of streetlights, spaced far apart in this edge of town.

The moments stretched out for eons as an unlimited patience stilled his hunger, as the distance closed at an infinitesimal rate; the difference and distance between prey and predator closing, though this relationship was known only to one of them.

Egathel was no longer Egathel; he was an ancient rite, an actor playing a role from time immemorial, which had spanned cultures and species, pervasive since shortly after life had begun, when the first predator emerged to feed.

Now he was positioning himself for his final run, and as that moment neared, his rage, his hunger, still restrained, strained against his instinctive self-control, the slow motion almost too agonizing for his frenzied mind to endure.

The dam of his control strained until it burst, releasing a torrent of violent motion and feeling that would engulf the hapless prey. Legs springing, a lunge and a twist in mid-air, claws ready to strike a disabling killer blow, he soared through the air like a raptor diving for a fish.

The splash upon impact was not water, but flesh and blood.

With a grasp quicker and more precise than that of a fishing eagle’s, the hunter was assured of success.

His prey was overcome before the human had realized precisely what was happening. The man had no time to scream; Egathel struck precisely, clawed nails raking a path that severed anything in his neck that might have allowed the man to react. Had he been intact enough to struggle, it would have been equally futile.

And then there was blood and sweet satisfaction.

Despite his decreasingly conflicted feelings about feeding, in more lucid moments he would recall with great clarity the sheer perfection of the moment prior to striking. The sense of inevitability that the blood meal was now his immediately prior to taking it was beyond compare. No ancient power or status held a candle to that singular feeling.

All was taken from the prey, the hunter draining it of the salty crimson nurturing stuff of life, that potent substance that was the only thing capable of satisfying the fathomless depths of thirst now known to the Nephilim.

First he let the victim’s continuing heartbeats force the blood out, siphoning life into Egathel; when this action eventually ceased, he held the body above himself, draining the blood from the open wound where he lapped at it with his abnormally long tongue.

As the human slowly died, the hunter watched its eyes blankly register the change from life to unlife, all the while uncomprehending.

After some minutes of this, watching the dead eyes, Egathel’s reason began to return. His meal complete, hunger subsiding, he discarded the body carelessly, not even watching its descent. Sinews, muscles, and bones were of no interest. Egathel’s attempts to explain this fact had thus far been unsuccessful, though it seemed that blood alone should not be enough to sustain him.

The empty corpse landed heavily with a sickening crack.

Never mind—it was enough for leeches, and there had always been aspects of Nephilim physiology that defied any naturalistic expectation. Why should this feeding behavior, this contagion, be any different?

Seemingly exhausted while paradoxically refreshed, he returned to his lair with none of the vigor with which he’d emerged from it, though he kept himself hidden from any prying eyes that may have been around and his steps were silent.

Dawn was approaching as he slipped once more underground, to sleep the sated sleep that always followed a meal; the one time when the hunger stopped tearing at the insides and the ancient mind knew true peace.

Vivid dreams of grandiose days long past began to play behind his nictitating Nephilim eyelids as he curled into a corner in his catacomb. In the first dream, Egathel and his kin had been victorious in battle and were feasting in celebration. They raised jewel-encrusted goblets of blood to honor each other; mad, snarling gibberish was spoken in place of a toast before they drained the blood, which gushed out of the cups in spurts as if issuing from a still-living thing.

Programming

writing poetry
is like programming wonder
in the hearts of others

Sunset Dawn

In fading light of setting sun
Summer's end hits me like a beam,
The realization dawning upon me
Like the dayside of a sunrise
Dawning on one who watched its magic
Transform night from atop a mountain.

The young thing I watched wax from
Wee hours now wanes away from me;
Turning on my timid expectations,
Its sparse gift turns to abundant
Avarice, swiftly engulfing the earth,
Eating the infant day out from under me.

I am awakened but not consoled by
Cool mountain air breezes blowing,
Biting reminders of the pre-dawn chill.
I steel myself for the trek ahead,
As the long descent down the mountain
And into the underworld begins.

A Whisper

Was it a whisper?
Was it my name?
Did I really hear anything?

From somewhere unseen,
off to the side of my reality,
peripheral to all else I perceive.

Was it a message
or some kind of sign?
If it's happened twice?

Like someone trying to wake me
from a sleep so sound
I don't know it's sleep,

I the unwilling,
uninterrupted dreamer
remaining steadfastly asleep.

But what kind of being
could it be harassing me?
A god or a demon?

If there were gods,
would they speak to us thus,
obscurely, to no clear purpose?

Just a whisper, "mortal!",
taunting our limited minds
while controlling our lives.

Or what temptation,
what evil purpose,
could be served by such

Sideways swipes
into mundane reality
from a lower plane?

Perhaps mundane's the word:
a whisper from a minor demon,
like the Lord of dust and linoleum.

Perhaps a voice from the future,
a four-wheeled destiny
awaiting my full descent.

Or else from the past:
forgotten hospital ghosts
haunting these halls of the unhealthy,

Just looking to bum
that one last smoke
before entering the eternal ether.

Maybe it's the disembodied
voice of my bladder,
crying out in impatient agony.

Or maybe part of me knows
something the rest forgot:
don't forget to get your parking validated.

Burnt Offerings

Sometimes addiction mimics ritual and superstition,
invisible world of smoke's wispy curls
and chemical receptors that suck in like nectar
the silent substances controlling our world.

hearing you

your little voice swung,
hung from my neck,
like a tiny precious stone.
remote as a star,
bright as a beacon,
your love closed the distance
at the speed of a blink
from afar.

Gom Jabbar

Oh, pain.
The pain.
Holding your hand in the gom jabar
hurts--does not harm.
It begins to burn.
We're well beyond thresholds now
and into endurance.
Learning the difference between
desiring a thing
and reaching to grasp it:
is it the pain or the fear
that kills the mind?

Jewels

jewels placed in cave-mouth

crushed as the roof collapses;

sweet juice of berries