Life is
tired and needs a jolt, my life not life in general. A war's been
waging internally, killing off people and places, which although
immensely satisfying does not alter the day-to-day. Nor, however, do
I wish to unleash the unkindness I harbour within, and I couldn't do
it anyway for outwardly I'm passive. Rigid in body, yet sheepish in
manner. A fully paid-up people-pleaser might be more exact, though
the teeth might be gritted or the face a frown. A plastered mask of
seriousness or a deer-in-headlights, not that I have any notion of
what my face is actually expressing, which does catch me out when
people comment because it's not necessarily how or what I feel at
that precise time, and so then I worriedly think to myself: am I
worried? and make a plausible excuse or swat their observation away
with a: Me, no! Everything's just dandy.People who appear placid always say it's fine. To everything that's asked of them: to any question, to any task or inconvenience. Because they want to help and be seen to be helpful, though at times they might inwardly seethe. Yet when they begin to say NO, oh, the guilt. And the anxiousness that results from refusing or feigning ignorance of something, all because the thanks that might come can come too late when the person who always says, no, feels compelled to say YES has long felt taken for granted. So this adopted stance is really in their best interests, yet their body visibly squirms like a worm cut and cut again when they very reluctantly give a shaky or too forceful NO.
But before then, before they've reached this no-going-back-point, which is like the flick of a switch blade, they've experienced their own viciousness turned in on themselves and also on figural others, all imagination based of course, but nonetheless violent. It might be healthy in the sense that no blood is shed externally or offence given, and that the fantasies lived out in the mind save the conflicted person, yet that same struggle continues to exist everyday. At a lower basement or underground level, like a camp fire that's constantly fed to keep it burning which might suddenly sputter and cause a spark or two to fly, which might then descend onto a bare leg or arm or the rump of a horse, so that the person tending it might pick a fight with his fellow travellers or the untethered horse might bolt, or if tethered rear up.
Actions – reactions – karma, isn't that said to be the cycle? All actions have consequences or something. What you sow you reap, what you reap you sow. I never was very good at parroting or paraphrasing doctrines, so that's as close as I'll get to putting it down in a such way that I hope makes some marginal sense. Do you grasp my meaning? Because I really can't think how else to put it, whereas if I was musing about it on a calmer day I might be more pedantic.
Thus endeth the lesson on a word with intellectual leanings, so the brain's not altogether fried in the hell consuming it inside which is something I suppose. Though it is flecked with black crows behaving like vultures dismembering slain bodies, whilst the horse I sit upon tramples them further underfoot. Horses usually step over such obstacles, but this black beauty's been trained otherwise and stifles their last grunts, cries and breaths with a solidly placed hoof. Well, it's my imagination isn't it? I don't wish to hear the suffering: drawn-out sighs that culminate in groans or chest rattles. The sounds of battle are more frightful, for me, than bloodied sights, for when my wrath has been spent I feel pity, and dying, gurgling sounds means I've gone too far, punished too much.
I aim to be cruel but kind with the sword I wield, but fury, if not managed, knows no bounds, even in a imaginative, and therefore presumed safe, landscape. My strokes are often not as clean or as deadly as they could be. My knife thrusts not deep enough, and so ensues a prolonged death amongst a mangle of inexpertly butchered bodies, which in guilt I'll set a flaming torch to later so that it burns as if it were a communal funeral pyre, sending my unladylike play up in a dark column of smoke with a rancid smell of fat and singed hair.
Picture credit: War, 1894, Henri Rousseau
