There are no heroes here, in the dark place, upon the black crust. Walk you say. Walk where you cannot walk. Strive for the slope and hope to get above it all. Fly to a safe clean vantage point, float upward, but you are stone, and there is no escape, no home, no warm bed and you have chosen this and there is nothing to be done but turn inward and make the best of a fucked up situation: be alone, be alive. Deep into your body you grasp for cynical humor and bastardized love. You stand upon the absurdity of how the world rips apart and causes great pain. All of this you feel as if terror is an old acquaintance and you have dressed it in a kind of light that glows and shows you the way and so you begin to walk along the dark line, upon the dense ground, through the silent vacuum that moves with old clothes and hopping birds. You bat away the outstretched hands, the broken teeth, the flies…yes, you stumble through the darkness as if you are special. You have to think this way because it is your shield and protection. Nothing can kill you since you are different and even if you fall, you will rise again and in the end you will smile. You can see yourself right now, smiling in the face of everything that is wrong. You are beyond this life, even here at the end, and then you realize your shield is ignorance and a lack of humanity and for that you are thankful.
tin hats 
IMO, narcissism generates artists. This is a heavy piece. You dig down into the resiliency/vulnerability paradox.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for saving me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on JT Twissel.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think I’m a limping phoenix.
Great post.
LikeLiked by 2 people
We may also need coping skills to survive this horrible world setting which changed dramatically in recent years. The everyday heroes are ones who do try to sincerely smile. It is helpful to have hope, to try and pass on kindness and empathy when we can. To receive these signs of caring, thinking human beings and reciprocate may somehow help us survive, until then we may hug and gather together with a united vote, a way to end the debacle.
There are those who smile in their mockery of others or who smile in their mean natured souls at those who need sanctuary. May we get our armor on and fight them off, overcome the way they continue to take down the progress we painfully worked on over centuries. Peace, Robin
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes Robin we are in some chapter out of KAPorter’s “The Ship of Fools”. I wrote long ago that this is a hardwire problem, where the ignorant prefer violence to reasoned compromise. Remember when people said don’t get a history degree?This is the consequence of a world filled with MBAs and people strictly following their own self-interest. Oh well, what time does the Circus Maximus begin? We don’t want to be late. Thanks. Duke PS, I have enough hours for a MBA, but couldn’t finish what the Russians call the final inch.
LikeLike
Ship of Fools colliding with B Traven’s Death Ship in a dying ocean.
I always look forward to your posts, Duke
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh boy! Our ignorance is not only a shield. It is our essence. Is it any wonder we’re messing up? We feel, we believe we are capable of running things, but that’s just our brains lying to us. Heck, there are 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) atoms in every CELL of our bodies, a number we can’t even imagine, let alone understand. The ripping apart of the world, and the pain of it, is part of a process much bigger than us dust motes. Our existence is a dang miracle. Our folly is our failure to see the wonder. We don’t suffer from a lack of humanity, we suffer from too much of it. Cheers. I really mean it. Cheers!
LikeLike