like fishhooks; an old kind of hunger
There is nothing that captivates the minds of men more than blood.
Certainly, one might argue that love or joy or passion all triumph over violence. Perhaps, some might even claim peace is the true key to prosperity.
That is not what I am saying, however.
What I am saying is this:
The crowd around is jubilant not on love, or joy, or passion. They are brimming with ecstasy over blood. They, for a moment, are elevated to the station of heroes and villains, gods and angels, monsters and beasts. It is blood and blood alone that allows one to become something other, to arise above themselves and the limitations of who they are.
The only songs I know are of war.
The only poems I understand speak of blood.
And that, I think, is what I recognize on Ipomoea’s face.
Love has a limit. Joy a summit that cannot be reached beyond. Hate, even, plateaus.
Violence doesn’t. War doesn’t. Blood doesn’t. The rage is limitless; the lust for more cannot be sated until it is all gone, and even then, the necessity lingers. It is why war changes mean. It is why they come back different.
I have seen many meet it. I have seen how it warps boys into what they would like to call “men” but, truly, it is something less refined. Because their hunger is not the only thing that matters in this world.
But, it is true, I have never seen any like this man with wings on his ankles and an expression caught between the violence of the stands and the disgust of a protestor.
Perhaps, if he stayed longer, I might have disagreed. Perhaps, if I had caught his name, I might have felt the urge to contradict him. But I don’t. I only measure him with a long stare, memorizing the lines of his face, the context of our meeting. Does he mean to say that one must rebel against such hunger? That they must stand firm despite the threat of it, despite the way it would be easier to cower from something so vast, so devastating?
Has he not yet learned that everything, eventually, succumbs to hunger? Wolves and fawns; lions and lambs; men and monsters. The whole world, I think, might succumb to one man’s hunger, if only it were insatiable enough. Nevertheless, I watch him go with thinly veiled curiosity, until he is out of sight and I am alone watching the blood spilt onto the sands.
