Armies of Death

Heralds of the night, the shadows rise up first from the underground having had the breath of hell blown into them. Sweeping over the earth like a swarm of locusts, they ravage life with hellfire. Absorbing death’s energy, they frantically copulate creating new life to replace the old. Obedient, expendable, and plentiful in number, these are the death soldiers of the army of hell.

Weary angles swoop down from the sky once again trying to resist the regime change, but they’ve been slaughtered time and again from the constant battles over the years and without the support of the masses, they’ve decreased in numbers and have grown tired and weak. Their cries have been forcibly diminished by the armies of death in their relentless effort to create a new world order of hollow-souls marching like drones to their death.

The soldiers of death have been cursed to exist on the cusp of life and death. Their faces are drawn and expressionless, while their eyes appear to stare out to a world of memories. Motivated by an insatiable hunger for life, they must kill and channel the energy of the living at their moment of demise to feel life pulsing through them. While for a moment they are revitalized by the life, what follows is the empathetic phase – they are forced to recount their victim’s entire life and feel the pain of their death. They are defined by these two phases of revitalization and empathy and compelled to repeat the cycle endlessly.

There are those who try to hide from him feeling it is their last strategy to avoid capture. The General has come for me. He reaches out his long arm, but keeps his distance. With eyes that pull you in like a vacuum, he fixes his stare on me like looking down the barrel of a shotgun. His long boney fingers are five sharp blades pointing at my chest. Staring intently at me, he makes a claw and thrusts it into my chest. I gasp and my eyes widen as he rotates his talons and sinks in deeper. Pulling back, he holds my heart in his hand. It still beats. Blood drips from my chest and down the length of his arm. My eyes roll back into my head to retreat.

I Want to Be Free

Hey diddle-diddle
caught up in the middle,
the baby found a fiddle,
which she played for me.

She twiddled it a little
until she found riddle,
stuck up in the middle,
she’d repeat to me –

I want to be free. I want to be free.

I stepped back
like a heart attack.
Flat on my back
What’d she say to me?

I want to be free. I want to be free.

Her voice was getting louder.
Started sounding prouder.
Rising from the earth
she surrounded me.

I want to be free. I want to be free.

The earth began to quake.
I began to shake.
Something started to break
inside of me.

A Smoking Gun

A cigarette burns in one hand. Smoke slowly rises. He gestures angrily with the other. A careful balancing act. The ash grows and I watch attentively to see when it will fall. He won’t put it out. A good distraction for me. A timer.

I can smell his breath. I can feel him spitting on my face when he speaks. I watch tonight’s pick-me-up fall to the floor in little scattered droplets. Blinking nervously, I cautiously roll my head downward. They seem to land indiscriminately, but could make a circle if I connect the dots in my mind. I wonder if his strong words could actually ignite a ring fire around me, protecting me from contact.

The ash grows longer now and I know that I have only a few seconds before time runs out and the bomb detonates. It always does. Time seems to slow down, my eyes widen and I watch the ash bow and then break off from the stem. My eyes follow its path as it descends gracefully like an old branch at the end of its life returning to the place from which it took its first breath. It is my last sight of freedom in this moment. A split second after it smashes against the cold hard bedroom floor, now only a fraction of what it once was, I look up and see the rage filling his eyes.

In one fluid motion I watch him swinging one arm high into the air and swiftly plunging it downward towards me. I am cut down like a tree limb that succumbs to the mighty ax. All my breath leaves my chest. I spin like a raging tornado until I lose my footing and the side of my face cracks against the floor. The impact blows the ashes away reducing them into ever smaller pieces of themselves. I blink. My eyelids get heavy. Motionless on the ground, I hear warped voices. They fade into the distance and it darkens. Just before the darkness constricts me with its tight embrace I take a moment to laugh at myself for thinking that I’d be so lucky to be surrounded by a protective ring of fire. With a smile on my face, my eyes snap shut and there is peace.