He stood on a crumbled monument atop a hill, a small shadow against a vast, soft, ruby mourning sky, staring into the sun with wire-stitched eyes that were spattered with dried anguish-tears and crimson flakes. Messy black hair spilled down over his forehead where it used to frame his eyes, like a nest of ebony snakes resting around thin slices of emerald ice. He wore the indigo robe of a midnight monk, a far-seer of dark truths, and around his neck hung an old, frayed, yellow-black, severed noose that trailed down his back like a ponytail. His wrists had fresh puffy pink scars from where he tried to dig trenches in them with a rusty kitchen knife; his palms were etched in inky heretic glyphs—circles, triangles, squares, and dots that he recited now from memory in arcane, sulphuric whispers. He muted:
His prelude is announced in these pages!
The unaccounted for—the Sage of Sages!
These head-ringing rhythms He doth spout
Turns loud shouters into slumping pouts
And throws their necks all about
Till red stupidité
Hath been hammered out!
It brings silence and brooding breezes! The Hebetudinous Head-banging! Destroyer of time-stained edicts!
Stale values it demolishes with spectacular candor
So that canned order can order no more.
O! What a tragedy it is to be ruled by mere shadows and glass!
Noxious green clouds of fetid gas
Now as knowledge, no longer pass.
It brings silence and brooding breezes! The Hebetudinous Head-banging!
Destroyer of time-stained edicts!
Youth of today, full with known tomorrows
Full too of untold sorrows!
Your life is to be had
None of you know this though—
So maybe it won’t be so bad.[1]
Ignorance is bliss! Ignorance is bliss!
Until philosophers decide to write like this!
It brings silence and brooding breezes! The Hebetudinous Head-banging!
Destroyer of time-stained edicts!
Thus the wise men greet it.
