Set the moon at my eyes

See it’s dark and there’s a full moon. The back yard is small but like any place it gets big in the dark, no matter how familiar or ordinary.

Forget everything you knew, or not, it makes no difference to me.

Out of the darkness you suddenly appeared
You smiled and I was taken by surprise
I guess I should have seen right through you
But the moon got in my eyes.

Call it a spell if you like, but what do you mean by a spell? You haven’t even the faintest idea what you mean by that word.

For now, as you hear me out you may think yourself mad — perhaps you are! — but maybe what you are hearing is only a corpse granted a temporary sanity.

Imagine if you found out they were wrong about corpses. That corpses continue to have feeling, even a kind of mad, mad consciousness like the worst trip you ever had — the taste of decay, the long nightmare of decomposition. No words! No screams. Only horror, the horror that comes of being fully, constantly exposed to the truest, most raw things in the universe!

When it happened to me they threw me into the sea and I entered the kingdom of darkness — not the cool pleasant darkness of a summer night in the backyard that you feel now, but the crawling underside, the crushing weight of the ocean. My own mother in the form of countless preying creatures, first the ones with backbones and then the ones without, dishonoured my body… tore, bit, ate, scattered in a thousand directions with my shredded, bleeding consciousness in their mouths, and were in turn eaten, scattered, and eaten again.

And all the while, the full weight of the ocean squeezing and grinding me to powder. Not all of me has yet sunk into the mud and the slime — but someday I will be all there. I wonder, will the horror of endless smothering mud seem a rest compared to the horror of being shredded and re-shredded, of feeling my already-shrunken head continually invaded by the small, stupid minds of the worms and crabs, which is the horror of being consumed by malignant ignorance itself; or will the mud, in the end, provide only new horrors, and no rest at all?

What if you found out the Bible was wrong when it said “the dead know not any thing?” In fact, only the dead know anything. If only they had burned me on a pyre like the pagans! I have gone an endless millenium or fifteen minutes when my only consuming wish was to be able to scream the words, “Burn, burn burn burn burn, burn me!”

I was so thrilled by the love you volunteered,
I gave my heart without a compromise
I guess you don’t remember, do you?
When the moon got in my eyes
I thought a kingdom was in sight
That I would have the right to claim
But with the morning’s early light
I didn’t have a dream to my name
You know the saying that all who love are blind