Jennifer Moxley

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THE ENDLESS CONSCRIPTION

The chaperone of brittle egos, with her porous empathy cage of a body, lives like an automaton among living beings. Even after the last granules of dirt have settled on her charges, the heavy shovel has been tossed away, and the rain has finally stopped falling, she is not safe. Somehow the famished ghouls always rise again. Buried by their apathy years ago, she knows how they feel. Moldering and useless beings, their overweening crisp egos wander the hallways of her cavernous guilt. “Shhh” they gesture with their sexless fingers, “we only want you to listen.”

THE SADNESS OF OLD MAMMALS

When the idea of you begins to leak out of your flesh, sinew, blood, and bones, you will be nothing but them and their failure. Pleasures? Fear of wastefulness shadows them.

Artificial frames do keep thought. Conducting excitement into passive potential the homeless idea squats in the object, informs it, and there lays in wait. Thought stops. No, not stops, is trapped. Trapped in yellows, greens, and browns. Petals of vision. Fingers the eyes’ touch. A encoded stream of fire from the mind through the body smeared onto blankness. Both are now doomed to one time and one place. There they sit awaiting the viewer with the key to illumination, a light like infrared that reveals what time’s indifference to matter’s messages has managed to keep from sight.

The gift of minor eternity, on a brief mammalian scale, is not this relentless coming to be but the tale you will later tell about it. It is a kind of love, insofar as it moves you.

THE SPOILT MALE CHILD

The fact that others live and thrive drives him to distraction. Equality makes him nauseous, and those who think themselves better than him become the subject of caustic contempt. Even the womb that bore him is undeserving of respect. Who does she think she is! Woe to those who are born with the ill-luck to desire him.

His scare tactics distract from the fact that he has nothing to say nor contribute. In a feeble attempt to slay reality, even when it’s correct, he builds a shoddy network of sophistical traps, snickers at earnest confusion. The only thing he successfully creates is an atmosphere of terror. It lives nowhere but in the minds of the pawns he has denied autonomous motives. When this sadist finally dies, alone and filled with self-pity, his domination will shrivel in his victims and, barring the occasional twinge of unease, it will be as if he never existed.