The Woes of Mechanical Force

I was up all night, alone, beneath bare bulbs as raw as my spirit, but burning. And while I trod my native sloth into the wood, within me a speechlessness reached to the farthest limits of my core and scrawled a hopelessness across my heart.

A vast shame swelled, gangrenous, within my breast: to stand with my countrymen at the dawn of this century, facing an enemy which is but the distorted reflection of ourselves. We howl at this foe, like dogs, and as the more howl, those who were silent also howl, captured in the great hysteria; howling into small cells, locked in cars, screaming at glowing screens--the grand divided mass.

And unexpectedly, like a shot from nowhere that ends freedom, unlike those to which I am accustomed from late night revelers , I was disturbed by a scream.

And then silence; more horrible than that which crippled me moments before; the wheeze in the throat of the exhausted city rattled like death.

“Come,” I said to myself, “I have heard locomotives ringing through my skull, hallucinated from all sides police cars moving in through the trees, Rottweilers and their men surrounding my gallery, rushed along the wall , sheltered upon the head of Alice ; I have attempted, mimicking the world’s, my own destruction, scooped needles from toilet bowls, staggered down stairwells and sauntered through traffic; I’ve thrown away my passport and walked off cliffs, pushed my shattered femur through my wound and crawled all night through infection; I have mourned and worshipped the dead sky above cities and found serenity with her severed limbs at the edge of the tracks; I have pushed away all love for myself; I have convulsed on the floor amid the shattered mirror; I have sat staring at the empty hand and laughed.

"Why this paralysis? We crush mythology like starving fools beneath their feet crush nourishment as they die. We have seen the Minotaur heralded as a God. We clone pigs. We split atoms over cities and moan when our little towers fall. The bankruptcy of angels upon whose back we've flown is nothing to us. Our sun is an old man. Nothing equals the splendor of our red sword battling for the first time in the millennial gloom."

I stepped outside. I needed no car. I stumbled out, like the living dead, in the absence of humanity, but suddenly awoke to the moon’s blade across my neck.

The great broom of nature had awakened me and swept me through the city. I stared at things without eyes. "The bat," I cried, "the bat needs no eyes."

The scream, the scream unleashed from the throat of night. Along the gutter I moved until I found the body, writhing and depraved. The tatters of his clothes dark with blood, the aura of piss and rotting flesh. Homeless no longer, he lay at the door of the earth with his last breaths in his mouth. No car in sight, only a bus trudged northward with it's hollow burden.

The street lamp shone yellow , electric, above us. I took his dirty hand in mine and searched his eyes for final word. He shoved his chin toward the sky and the moon flashed in his pupils. "I was a baby , once." The long mural of a life stretched before us and through it we walked into the gears of the tower where time ground into dust fell from the eyes of our city like sparks of glass, diamonds. A bucolic world stretched out beyond, veiled by dark clouds poured from brick smokestack obelisks; a child walked along dirt road listened to gravel beneath his feet, eyes reading the ground, the blinding sun in flakes of broken bottles, the road that winds down from hills, passed black teeth, into a gaping mouth, along the iron tongue of age, down the barbed throat of civilization. To lay upon the pavement, enjoying the last most precious token of humanity beneath the moon.

A shadow fell across his face. Man and woman stood above us in black cashmere. The objects they reached out in their hands cast blue green light across the dying face. "Fuck you," he said with his last breath. They scurried away. Death before synthetic compassion. From within his silence I dictated our will to all living on the earth:

Futuristic Manifesto Revised

stay tuned…

(The above is a reply to Marinetti's "The Joys of Mechanical force," which appeared in Le Fiagro on Feb. 20 1909. While we appreciate the energy of the futurists, we maintain the rights of evolution from the enchantments of the past. Nor do we, in fear, embrace death, but with dignity.)

O