2001-10-18 - 7:54 a.m.

'The indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians'.

Such a phrase is instantaneously my own flagpole. I begin to climb. Without direction on this floating world, and not of it an artist.

'The indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians'

Do I vitiate vexed? Or am I merely a spoilt 'ingenuo'?

With most any phrase, I break away. Attachment is optional, and I tilt away not having drunk of the appointed cup.

These six words are silver. A concept for the inept. Pure unhinged inebriated destruction. A sentence completed. Not the end, not the beginning of the end. The end of the beginning?

Repitition is not 'called for'. Horror is not summoned. It is a chain. I am weighed down. I cannot plummet faithfully. Weakness is a reverse motion. Plummet. That word will be marked for a century. My joints will not be held. How can I compare my own pain to that of those before me? But I do. I subsume my guilt under the assertion that for them it was all over in a matter of seconds.

I do not want to speak. I will not be the cantankerous guest. I will 'trim my moustache'. I am not gauche. Neither am I alacrity's darling. I do not mill about fecklessly. I do not have many miles to go. The realisation is gradual: I was made for this small island.

I want to speak of the horror, but what would come away but the impertinence of a ghoul? I want a gaze at the visage of a moment. Yet....turn, away, out.

I can only cringe. I feel like I'm implicitly wrong. I put out my hands - an act of faith, a plea for reason and understanding. But I am brushed away - no, taken away by my own insufferable weightlessness. I exist without an emblem. I am blind. Dumb. Deaf. Mute. Alive.

troilus

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