Shadows

In terror there is godlessness. On all sides of us terrorists flourish. Do not be deceived by preachment or politics. Those who are splattered with the blood of innocence are not graced by the love of God.

In the era of these plagues there is but one God-suffering question demanding of us: Where are you? Where are the menders, who can repair what is broken? Where are the healers to cure our afflictions and exorcise from us the demons of our narcissism and self-devouring madness? Where are the peacemakers who will bring us into the circle of justice, restore balance, facilitate in the dialogues of peace? When we are faint and falling, who are those who will put bread into the hands of the weak and famished, even though we are contagious with viruses of violence and greed? When, indeed, we are dying of thirst in the fouled deserts of our suicidal toxicity, who are those who will give water before the perishing of our parched and polluted, rattling souls?

If there are answers to that which must be spoken, our deeds are the words. If there are no answers, then guilty in this silence ask: What are we doing? I will tell you: We are telling lies.

This is the closing argument. These are the words.

Reenter Bound Woman and Crippled Dancer as the Hunchback turns and retreats upstage. He moves in ways to overtly reveal the impact of his physical deformity. The two women are costumed in rags, appearing as impoverished refugees, as the wretched of the Earth. Spotlight, if available, as they huddle together while the Crippled Dancer speaks and the Bound Woman looks into and accuses the audience with her eyes.

CD: SPOOKY EYES

Eyes of terror stricken children; they grow up and old, into the eyes of frightened women and frightened men. Those of you who live away and do not know what it is to stand in the shadowed corner of a criminal reality, in the metallic stinking sweat of fear and confusion, and to be raped by one whose love should have guarded the tender flesh from all and any such horror and violation. This terror, this terrorism! This other nation, this homeland insecurity. And oh, there are many forms of rape and violence, in the politics of the inhuman, in the shadow lands, in the tunnels of night, in the catacombs and burrows of evil where nothingness thrives.

Those of you who live away, and are rewarded with approval, do not know what is to be branded on the cleanness of internal innocence with these self-conscious stains of immoral filth and oozing sores, impoverishment and imprisoning poverty; wounds that have mouths but do not speak of the ultimate dangers and degradations, dare not speak, but would rather hide themselves from public sight and light of day.

This too is a theme on the human condition. Only the educated and well behaved, the safe, do not speak of it and talk at a distance instead of the economics of war, of social disintegration and substance abuse, gangland violence, immigrants from dysfunctional nations and the increasing statistical evidence of mental illnesses, privatized prisons and overcrowded orphanages. The while passing over the internal refugees of our own dysfunctions and national psychoses. Every trauma is individual while every individual houses the potential for tragedy. The ignorant, meanwhile, true to the curse of their cause and kind, shrug as in drunken stupor and heavy with intergenerational dullness, insensitivity and the unconscious burden of misdirected sacrifice, guilt and non-response, turn away.

You who live on a shelf and are familiar with reaching happily into the cookie jar that has no agenda for punishment, think about falling, and a huge, very ugly and hungry spider creeping down your throat and nesting in the sweet, sticky dough of your soul: an invitation to a feast of flies.

Think about children who are haunted, hunted in the prisons of their houses, and who die there, unnoticed, yet who run still and jump and play among you, as if their nightmares were too unimaginable for shame to share, too uncildlike, too unclean to be permitted onto the playground of normalcy.