The Hammer

HUMBLING IS THE loudness that comes with change. Change, that is the death of me. 

Fear not, I am built so that the other may be antiquated, else we remain under its tyranny. Under the lament of a new star, it is rendered obsolete by its willingness to give, and my corpse will dance to the ushering in of change. Fear not, for as I give, I will take from you. Do not flinch from the efforts I demand, or the groan of the earth that spews fire and calls for you to advance. Fear not the cracking of the whip, nor the ache of your back, nor the long and arduous prayer, to which the beggar in his darkest hour will attest.

You are transforming as we speak, 

hardening into the face of me,

my eyes, and lips, and ears to be.

Thus, I draw along the chain, where bound

the dying of a dream is found.

I speak to my creation in its tongue of destruction, and it claims the bodies of those I rally to my service as its own, claims them as arousal, as gratification. 

There must be joy in this sacrifice. 

There must be joy in its persistence. 

I know you, know the dissatisfaction in your quiet nature.

After a while, the landscape of sounds that is constructed will meld into a uniform drone. When settling into your role you will first perceive the hammer as it strikes hot metal, the chisel as it chips away at diminishing stones, the saw as it tears away at dry lumber. Their individual voices racing to reach you, they each settle in, and attempt to expel the invaders. Then gradually and all at once, they are the same, then fighting again, then amalgam once more. 

The clamour of instruction and the cry of injury form the beat of the drum, and in the succession of their ambitions, being dashed, or achieved, they fall and rise with such insistence that all else is swept away. Victory belongs to the moment then, never to the victor, never to the bloody sword, or the steady shield. And yet these continue to strain for your attention, as the constituents of a violent storm, unobserved by the many, are the tunnel each of us must venture into alone.

You would rather speak old words than hear the new,

You would not deign the indignity of the cave.

You revoke the light yet insist on the shadow’s existence.

The categorical denial of silence until the day’s work is done and laid aside. The tool, the man, and the curse of their union. You sense the one or the other disappearing, now they are no longer the hammer, or the chisel, or the saw. 

Now the hammerchiselsaw strikes, chips, tears. It pulses with a rhythm that breaches walls and sneaks through keyholes, sings to the senses while it eviscerates them. There are countless hammerchiselsaws now. They no longer surround you. They inhabit you. Pull and prod at your stomach. Grope at your skin from inside. Finger your ligaments, your tendons, your very nerves, to find where the point is between terse and torn. They will find it. They will march on. You are engulfed by them. Commotioned by the hammerchiselsaw, you move to evade the pain, no longer afraid of the lesser pain of movement itself.

We howled at the moon, with a fear in our blood.

The moon, in contempt, sent upon us a flood.

But the light that he stole we had stolen again,

As we crept from the darkness he sent.

Creation laughs like a madman and disembowels itself, fortunate as it is, the first to realize the magnitude of what it has come to defile, what sacrosanct ground it had deemed, in its decadence, to be fit for fornication, to be made a mockery of. Now the idol stands. Now the fires are lit. Now there is no returning, only the way forward is bright and paved in molten gold. 

You reach for the hammer.