Clouded Lenses

I'd just like to avoid any potential cries of plagiarism by acknowledging the fact that the last line is a quote from the song "Our Lady Of Sorrows" by My Chemical Romance.

Clouded Lenses

 

Hollowed out buildings stare at men in disgust. They ask why. The men face the ground, ignorant of the answer, begging for the end. They fear the watcher. They dread the glint of his glass. The wink of fate.

                       They pray that the enemy will not appear. They dislike killing, although they are obliged to lance the young not grown to play war and the old too grown to play at all. They dislike killing but they are not cowards. No. Cowards do not lance innocence and wisdom as heroes do.

                       Their hopes of a quiet day amid the starving buildings are not realised. The grand board sings clearly; the lines move with unerring certainty. However, the blood flows more capriciously. The fight is quick: a quarrel of numbers, nothing more. The men continue on, hoping to discover the end, perhaps a tangable thing whispered of and hidden somewhere, awaiting discovery.

                       Far away guns fumble across the skeletal city. They know the end is near, as all do, but fend off youthful fate with the decaying dream. Fate must delay its course for now, biding time until the forgone conclusion.

                       The watcher finds a place to sit and pass judgement. A man betrays himself to all-seeing eyes. The glint of his glass. The wink of fate. A ragdoll tumbles. Its comrades press themselves to the ground, hoping to sink down where bullet and shell cannot reach. The watcher withdraws back into an enclosed night where the bitter daylight does not dare to reach.

                       The stench of war is strong as they pass through another graveyard. The dead children of man: scorched metal cages with molten smoke and burning black blood. The dead children of God: dismembered meat with splintered pearl and pooling lurid red. These things do not sicken them. They used to. They care nothing for the shattered iron creatures, but feel sadness at the defiling of the divine creation, friend or ‘foe’.

                       

Night brings neither peace nor rest. The search for the end must continue. Stars stab through filthy clouds, glittering beauty to be seen by all but touched by no hand of flesh. The infinite eyes of a disappointed artisan looking upon a work ruined, too late for repair. Perhaps they should be left to their rot and a new piece begun. It shall be similar in many ways but bereft of the gift of humanity. They were given that so plentifully and learned to scorn and hate it, percieve it as another shackle to be cast aside on the path to their new ‘ascendancy’. They were given the custody of a fragile glass through which to view all creation and replaced it with the already rusting and corrupting iron of science. They gave back to their benefactor nought but poison. They now view the heavens through the infantile lens of the cradle. Even those petty creatures who claim to honour the artist through worship, some devoting their lives to perverted, abhorrent pursuits of ‘virtue’ and blindly binding themselves with mere utterances of the tongue made into fortresses of ‘faith’ to hatred of life. They have no comprehension of how they declare war against the greatest gift their ‘Lord’ has to offer: life. They even declare these empty, lifeless tombs as ‘Houses of God’ and murder, terrorize and destroy in the name of their One True Gods.

 

A final tear is shed by the architect before the world is left to its fate, left to be sucked dry  and then given the blackest of funerals by vampires clad in innocent white.

 

                       Victory is ever more assured by passing hours, but danger does not  yield yet. They no longer fight but play stubborn games in concrete forests. The man-made engines of war are of no use here; mice scurrying between mounds, pillars, decaying walls must converse a simpler war. The watcher stalks these man-crafted landscapes, observing ebb and flow. The men are reminded of his presence with a moment of laxity. The corpse seems stamped with his mark. No chance ridden scheme or frenzied butchery, but single blooming reds.

                        He feels no grudges or hatreds, he is simply a presence, inhuman, silent, watching as distant creatures squirm for life, above notions of arbitrary loyalty. He exerts his will, reaches out and smothers the candle-flame, watches the water ripple, lapping up against the sides, desperate for escape. The men fear him as one might fear a shadow, always strongest when the sun seems brightest and full of hope.

                        The grand sweep, daring thrust and calculating guile are lost to cherished memory of more noble wars in ages which passed just scant weeks ago. Now a war must be fought not sword to sword or even with the petty might of cannon, but with wretched picks etching obssessively at the faultless rock.

                         What did we seek to gain from this struggle? Something great? Something small? Perhaps ‘we’ is a lie here. It is only ‘they’, those who wear expensive suits to war and have no need of rations, who stand poised to retrieve something from the lakes of blood. We, the pitiful ghosts of mere boys, the wretched remnants of a generation’s youth, nothing but ruined minds and broken bodies, are left with nothing. Just blood on our hands and death in our heads. They claim that we have become immortal through our heroic deeds, that we shall live forever. Our hearts may beat, but our souls are long dead, buried with the fallen. We look back now to the days of our naivity, when we dreamed of the glories of war.

 

How wrong we were to think that immortality meant never dying.