A Welcoming Light In The Shadow of Inscrutibiltiy: For What Is STRENGTH, But The Power to Remain… UNKNOWN?

The crowd out there in the seats of this theater, they speak of darkest timelines, but here in my perch on center stage, knows the secret of all. There is but one line, and it is the one possible. There is no other, and this line is the bloodforce of will. Impossible to deviate, for it is by choice that it threads. I might make a whisper of fate, and a character may fall and die, but it is but a ploy, and the applause light flashes red above the stage, and if you are of hearty stock, you will not demure.

YOU WILL COMPLY.

Somewhere a secretary makes harried motions as an angry gathering is arranged. She connects coiling wires all across a great divide; the Democratic Party conference call after the 2020 election. Those who have lost their seats of power, many of them of the centrist bent, are haranguing those who stayed off ravenous money-full challengers in pitched battles. They blame the winners for their own failures. You have made me weaker, they cry, with your dangerous talk of change. Somewhere a counselor urges caution. It is not clear where in the theater they lie. They whisper of power and its maneuverings. How victory has its own cost. The fact remains, how little understood it ever was, power corrupts. And so, the winners sit back, and fight less hard, and things cement like shoes, the somber tread of a too sad victim of an overdose of sleeping pills.

The audience laughs, a peal shooting across the balcony. The box seats are not amused. One carries a rifle and has their sites on any particularly well mannered players, who should make the play too real again.

A prop-master shuffles in the dark between scenes, picking up discarded meanings. Urging calm. Honoring themselves with a drink of imaginary wines, the crushed fruits fermenting in a jealous struggling author’s mind. Crediting himself with his companion, doing the hardest work, the secret master of us all, the rust-suited janitorial decay artist. The handshaker of time.

“I warned you!” screams the showboat! A young brillaint beauty in a costume of the glorious arrays, powerfully stitched into fine lines. “I warned you all! But did you listen!?” A gasp of silence and all enrapt, to drop at revelation, on these bold intonations, stitching, rending our hearts like consciousness dyed different shades, turned on a dime.

And as the curtain falls, the playwrite does not appear. But rather hides. And runs away. For what’s been learned? The truth, the secret name, of endings? The work of artistry? Nothing but fear, and breath, and…

This Has Been My Post-Mortem of the 2020 U.S. Election. Congratulations to Joe Biden.