Derelict Space

“There was a time – maybe with the last visit by the comet Halley – when your lamentations about the “progressive degeneration and diminution of the human to the perfect herd animal” could comfortably coincide with your continued allegiance to that very herd. “At least my instincts are free,” you said, as you carried on living with your fatherlandishness and hugging your pieces of sod. But now, as the pack of which you proclaimed yourself leader readies for the hunt, your devotion to all that we left behind renders you superfluous, and us as obscure to you as to our former bosses and border guards. Your dangerousness, it seems, was only perceptible when your contrariness and theatricality kept us from understanding just how far we could go in your absence.

But laying in ambush on the edge of an abyss has a way of clarifying just what necessitated leaving the herd behind; us in a rhododendron thicket awaiting your administration – hiding in the irony-thick air, knowing that the irony was a dessert reserved for our pleasure alone (as you’d be choking not on it but upon whatever evisceration propelled against the Earth’s gravitational pull), mindful of how much you spoke about nature but how little of it you’d actually inherited – until with your last breaths you experienced the whole of it.” Mark Dyal