Lights Extinguishing Slowly

Here before you stands as proud testament, the last words of me, Dylan Stewart.

As fetid undertaker of disbelief I stood before you in my prime as a majestic spectacle, a tight-rope walker across a circus of gaping mouths.

A wonder of the very world upon which I skipped and jumped, left my indistinct markings and then was gone without a trace.

Well now my blood runs down the walls of resentment, my mind regurgitating my daily penance for things said and done.

For all these things and countless more, I am sorry.

I am sorry for the things done and not done, achieved and fallen so far short of.

Every smog-stained commute, the city’s dust decorating the lungs with phlegm wallpaper paste.

Coming up for air and smoking cigarettes, lining the stolid veins and arteries with chemical depositories and trans-fats, stagnating blood cells with one more drink, just one more drink.

Another chance polluted, another love lost in the ether of lust, desire burnt away through years of lying rotting in one’s vanity and feculence, watching your own mind and body go to ruin like an ancient metropolis.

I look down upon the world and vomit from a great height.

Whilst I bathe in Coca-Cola the poetry of youth is stencilled in neon billboards that rape the stars of the night sky.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to download foetuses from some vast internet database, create human life from binary code, 0-1-0-1-0-1, clone yourself so that every hour of every day you can see just how beautiful you are.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to build up empires in a lazy afternoon and cast devastation upon them in a fleeting afterthought.

What if the electricity ran dry, lights burnt out, cars collided in mechanised bliss, airplanes paused before descent like a ball thrown and not caught.

I’ve seen it all and now when I stab my eyes out with kitchen utensils stained with the rust of yesterday’s food I will see nothing more.

From Belfast to Brighton, the Isle of Skye to St. Ives, Piccadilly Circus to the cobbled backstreets of fuck knows where.

It’s all a mirror-image, a tapestry sown with false promises and scarcely concealed lies.

We are the vermin!

The vermined ones who in our finest hours pose for posterity and hang photos in frames on walls, a snapshot of a second that sets into concrete a memory now long since lost.

Yes if it were down to me, I’d rain down a million Hiroshimas upon you and your vainglorious shopping selves.

Level Manhattan like a billion-dollar Hollywood movie, retire the Eiffel Tower to bed, set graffiti artists to task on the Taj Mahal, pack all the Pyramids and Roman ruins into storage, dismantle the life’s work of mankind’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, poets and priests, artists and entertainers.

The finest achievements in science and medicine, economics, space travel and academia all cast to the raging bonfire of my ennui.

I’d tear great chunks out of religious manuscripts and knaw them to a pulp between my foaming teeth, ejaculate upon Mona Lisa’s smile and lay landmines beneath the paving stones of Las Ramblas, Oxford Street, Times Square and Sunset Strip.

In the words of Mr. Carl Panzram – I wish mankind had one neck and I had my hands round it.

Suffocation in the junk dens, feral dogs, oil cartels, mass media conglomerates, used-car salesmen, disaffected travel agents and frustrated shelf-stackers in just another Walmart graveyard, perverted teachers of primary children, hysterical bus drivers who keep on pulling themselves back from veering across into oncoming traffic.

Here stands your Messiah!
Born again!!
Born again to spread famine, drought and whichever venereal disease you might choose, stamp flowers into dirt where only weeds may sprout.

But this is all for nothing these tidings I bring.

These prophesies I offer up to the world, my dictatorial rule as God and the Second Coming are routinely ignored to fall on deaf ears.

Fair enough then I say to thee.

You can just wash your acne faces in sinks of hydrochloric acid, feast on banquets laced with strychnine and hang yourselves from ceilings using your favourite neck tie.

I take it all back. I take it all back......

We might as well retire gracefully from living, extricate our being and try our hand at something new.

At the end of the day we’ve given it our best shot but things just aren’t working out.

Life is past its sell-by-date, it’s gone rotten and we don’t know what to fucking do with it.

So ends this parable from me, Dylan Stewart; could be a suicide note, could be a love letter.

Or it could be the tired old ramblings of a withered drunk, slumped on a bar, chewing on his false teeth, trying to remember the way home as the landlord tolls the bell to signal time gentlemen please.