#two white-haired hot anime boys who represent the sin of greed??

[reverie-starlight]

the ban from seven deadly sins to mammon from obey me pipeline is so fucking funny to me

[sidpah]

Glory! 2

Ending up here again I wonder, why is there never any light? By light I don’t just mean brightness, I mean color, levity, Sun… Where are you, you beautiful hot-blooded creature? Why do you run from me? I won’t turn my back again, I promise… Tenderly eased into a state of approximated pleasure,I’m nearly carried away somewhere fantastic when that one-legged preacher starts his maniac call sending shivers through my blood-packed eardrum… “Oh, but don’t you see how they’re wasted! And they’ve tasted the sweet vagrant sin… The fragrance of entropy bleeds from their skin as it touches other warm bacteria-riddled skin! And how my bile riiiises soon as they set about it… Never forget: the most pious man’s the one who claims to have forgotten all about it... Animals needn’t be animals! Beasts, cast your burden off! And kneel down before you eat, before you sleep, before you leave this temple you walk in, the hair and the skin are all nails in your coffin, tell me, must we return there again and again to remind yourself how dreadful the whole cursed cycle truly is?”

Feeling cued, I stand, not sure whether I can walk, but goddamn it, it’s gotta be an easier death on those sand dunes the next block over… I’ll fall on the trunk of a cab, hook my fingers into its wheel wells and hang on to get gone… But as I stand and my head dips down, long gobs of half-clotted blood oozing from perforated skull, I get the woozies and trip those three deadly feet from curb to the middle of the street and I hear a screeching of tires on pavement and curl to protect my already shotgunned head and I’m gone to that sandy shore, that mythopoeic desert surrounded by a million others who tried to fail so completely that they were honored as true pioneers… Bloody swamps made by dead fellahin in deserts collecting their prizes for dying in the heat of gunpowder and fury. The hour struck zero and they all braced themselves for the bitter memorial homage to their Great Omnipotent Delusion…

Curtain rises, protagonist slips on stage, no merchant peddler wiser than tourist mark – snapshot lens glare a wide dusty American grin – Even he isn’t sure if he’s acting or being acted – Green fatigues eye each hunched extra with gated suspicion – A finger twitches, nearly setting off a thick wave of gunfire – Everyone breathes a heavy sigh – muscles relax – A vengeful hallelujah, a bright flare, a second burning Sun, an eruption of visceral smoke and red dust of the lurid town snows all around…

Or it’s red ambulance lights, a curse driven into my ribs. Jerry’s still yelling… But it’s not his voice anymore. It’s Kalday Suglaj, that god-healer in rags… It’s the cloying rhythmic cadence of the street-evangelist, but it’s a ragged pagan voice drilling them directly into that eighth hole in my head…

“Two-thousand years come and gone, and just how many more before the dawn’s shot down from its seat in the sky and laid sacrificially upon the ground feeding buzzards all tradition-bound?… Tradition bound us to the fabled lives of men who’ll never again walk the earth, as if they ever truly did, and weren’t just legends, deified by mouths hungry for heroes – A plague, a god, a fraud, just who are we kidding? Leave it up to the merry men, those denizens of disgrace! Every one of them’ll sell you a book for your soul, all the while impaling you on their devoutly righteous pole. They all take to survive, but greed makes survival so much more palatable. So every time, mark my words, my friends, ev-e-ry time, they’ll steal more flesh than the pound they tell both you and themselves they need as they take a dull butter knife to your love-handles!

Let me tell you ‘bout a man… a man I met recently who lived through the horrors. He is a hero, and yet no one would listen to a word that came out his mouth… I listened, I listened and I’m here to tell you all of his harrowing account… Lie yourself down on a street at night...”

I’m there, waiting as the red lights close in, the siren deafening… I push my good ear to the pavement to drown out the noise…

“Somewhere in the uncharted boondocks lit up by the full Moon and pickup headlights… Around him the gravel shatters and then shatters and then shatters into pieces of pieces of pieces while dark blood splatters steel-toes and asphalt meteors gouge his cheeks, scratch his eyeballs. Heavy links of chain yank tight round his neck bruised purple black, grated and fired by stone rockets and torn apart on streets on the outskirts of right fuckin’ here.”

I hear the loud squeals as ambulance doors open and a collapsible stretcher unfolds its wheels with a clang... There are hands on my body turning me right side up, but I refuse to respond.

“His wrists, impotent, roped together grinding spine since he was kidnapped and shackled like four hundred years refused to pass after one night stepping out of a bar with no words to drunken strangers who were looking for a scapegoat on which to vent their ancestor’s frustration…”

“Pack his head…”

“Support his neck… don’t lift him yet…”

I feel the rough hemp digging into bony wrists… I’m rolled onto the low stretcher, lifted, strapped, thick velcro gripping my arms and chest, legs and ankles, and I’m yelling at them, “Just get me to the next street! Get me to the dunes, man! Get me to the dunes!” But they don’t seem like they can hear me.

They keep shining a light into my eyes and that’s okay, I’m feeling warmer already…

Face of a young Tibetan boy looks down on me. He’s scratching “Liberate Tibet” on a mud wall… Before he can finish, he’s swarmed by drab military uniforms dragging him to a brutal tortured death… This is the land that Mercy forgot…

I feel the burn of my face peeling off grinding against the raging asphalt…

He dies nameless and noble…

Who am I to receive their misguided anger? Am I representative for any in-group? I’ve always been the meekest of outsiders…

Ghosts are gathering in the streets… pale generations clinging to each other’s waists… They all know what’s coming, but no one dares say it aloud… As the truck doors slam shut and Chinese guns flood the thin markets and alleyways… Cell doors shriek embracing robed prisoners, raped and cut…

Sirens wail from the scene but words, manic words, Jerry’s words, still bounce inside the confined little cell, wires and tubes across my face…

“…Reverently they severed that black devil man with the cane in his grip from the white woman at his hip – They did this to him so they did this to me! Tell me it didn’t happen! You know it did! Those dreary soldiers rushing, marching, folding their hands at their hearts… set on getting back the nothing they once were so quick to dismiss! Well they can dismiss us and while they’re at it, they can kiss us a fine ‘fuck you too’ as we pray to be freed from their blessed tyranny – The prince in his finery was shameless. Now we are stones laid before his merciless feet. We threw mud into their faces, on their uniforms, across their eyes and hair, but ended up wearing their mark on our bare chests... You know, I will change what I hate but it will not change me… And I may hate what I change but it will never change me… I will say it a-gain. Say it with me! I will change what I hate but it will not change me… And though I will hate what I change, it will never change me…”

 If I could talk, I’d love to tell him how wrong he is… that we must grow and be flexible, that hate versus hate never succeeds… I can’t even pretend he’d be able to listen… Words never matter to someone who’s caught in his own perpetual rut, so full of righteous fury he thinks he can alter a course of events he himself helped to instigate… Prejudicial anger has an inertia that’ll steamroll even the most skillful and best-intentioned humanitarians. And what use are these thoughts speeding at seventy miles an hour away from the very man I wanted to meet? And what would he know with the likes of a case, and like that, I remember the scaly tote… I yell at the medics, “Give it to me! It can’t fall in the wrong hands. Are my hands the wrong hands? Whose hands are yours?  Bring me back! I must speak with him!”

But they make like they don’t understand. Those sly bastards. They know the sides we’re on. I will get away, though, I will get away… I vow without a breath. And the strange thing is, in this careening ambulance taking me not to a hospital but to an underground blacksite prison, for a moment I really believe it’s possible…