PSALM 12: On the Meat Train

This morning I took the train.

***

The bizarre thing is that I look more human than a lot of real human beings. It’s cosmic kitsch, like when Charlie Chaplin lost in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest. When you’ve lived for as long as I have, believe me, you start noticing how often these things happen. You start getting suspicious. Oh, I don’t know. That maybe there really is an Intelligent Force out there shaping the cosmos. Some Unimaginably Awesome Being for whom humanity is a punchline held back for far too long. He knows the gag must come to an end. But he dares not. Because he also knows there are no more punchlines after it. Nothing worth spit, at least. And so he draws it out. He chews it like cud. He swallows it. He regurgitates it. He chews some more. On and on. He’s sick of it but he cannot admit it. You start getting suspicious.

***

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in an Unimagibly Awesome Being. Though I don’t deny that there may be one, chances are there isn’t. At least I don’t remember him. And my memory is long indeed. No, I don’t remember him. I don’t remember seeing even a hint of his shadow. What I remember, though, is ancient humans—barely out of the trees—burying their dead in the hopes that there is more to existence than eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, and fucking. They painted the bones of the dead with red ochre and created symbols and rituals. They drew strange images on cave walls and told each other stories so that they can make sense of the whole mess in their desperate search for patterns in the events of their indescribably short lives. They shed blood upon crude altars to buy power from forces beyond their ken and make their existence last just a little more. They looked up the skies at night and imagined they saw the faces of those who are gone.

***

You must understand that I don’t have all the answers. Truth be told, I don’t even have a lot. I have bits and pieces. I have glimpses and guesses. Not much more than your entire species, in short. Look. I don’t admit this very often, but I don’t even know how it began. I don’t remember. Maybe I was born the day your species was born. Maybe my fate is inextricably linked to yours. A romantic notion but hardly probable. At what point did your ancestors become human beings?

***

Long ago, some crazy fuck wrote about me. Or he wrote about someone people nowadays think is me. It wasn’t very flattering. I usually don’t give a flying fart about details like that. But what that man wrote stuck. Even today, billions believe what that man said about me. It’s… annoying.

***

Yes, I look more human than a lot of human beings. I look… finite.

***

This morning I took the train. It doesn’t matter where I’m going. I come and I go. There’s nothing much else left to do. So I took the train. A family was sitting across from me. They were remarkably ugly. No, don’t look at me like that. I mean no disrespect. I’m not commenting on the quality of their humanity. They were simply ugly. They were poor and worn out. The mother and the father were probably young by your standards but they looked weathered. Their skins were dry and sagging. Their teeth were dead ends. Their lips curved down at the edges, as if weighed by the chains of the human condition. Their eyes looked absolutely bovine.

***

The child sitting on the mother’s lap was predictably ugly as well. Flat face, bad skin, cheap clothes lovingly bought from some sidewalk vendor. Yet her eyes were alive. They sought out faces like a man looking for nuggets of gold from a pan filled with silt. They would look at one face and gently but firmly discard it from her sphere of attention. They would look at another face and consider for a moment if this held a small treasure within. Unsatisfied, they would move on to other faces. The child was a prospector of human souls, if such things actually exist.

***

Those eyes locked with mine.

***

There are about 6,786,216,374 human beings on this planet today. I read that on the Internet. Each one of these human beings have absolutely no role in the intricate clockwork that turns in the belly of the cosmos. If the entire race disappears in one quiet moment, the universe will go on.

***

Maybe I was born the day you people were born. And I’ll die when you people finally die off. It won’t take a lot for that to start happening. I can pull Wormwood out of the sky. I can knock away the moon or extinguish the sun. I can roll time and space into a miniscule ball of pure gravity between my palms and bury it in the center of the planet. I can split atoms with a fragment of a dream. And then you will be gone. And then I will be gone. Maybe. If I’m still here, though, there won’t be any great loss. Silence would be another adventure. I may take to the stars. Maybe I’ll find another species like yours. At any rate, the universe will go on.

***

The child’s eyes locked with mine.

THE PSALMS OF HATRED
Psalm 1 (Video)
Psalms 2 to 7
Psalm 8
Psalms 9 to 11