Catching F.I.R.E. - Goals

Nearly twenty-one years ago, I left behind an engineering career to write full-time. It was a dream I’d been working toward fulfilling for the previous five to six years. Ideally, I would have waited another six months to a year to pull the trigger on that change, but circumstances did not work out. In hindsight, that additional time would not have changed anything except me getting a small hunk of metal to mark my time as an engineer.

When most people hear what I was able to do, they say, “You are so lucky.” And they are right. I am, in more ways than they likely know. I am not one to say luck, random chance, had nothing to do with my life. It did. As did what I, or really we, did with that luck (Karen has a big part in this, too). The two parts are really inseparable.

By the time I left engineering, I knew the profession likely wasn’t the one I was best suited for for the rest of my life. I liked the work, at least most of it. I liked the challenge of solving problems and still do. I liked many of the people I worked beside directly and still miss seeing them. I was decent at what I did and could have advanced farther. But the environment and prevailing attitudes were not for me.

Ideally, I would have found another engineering job with a company that might have been a better fit, preferably something involved with space-based communications. I looked but was constrained by Karen’s career and job situation which would not easily transfer to the locations I was looking at. Balancing two people’s wants and needs is part of the price of marriage. Even though mine was the primary salary at the time, it was not mine alone to say.

When Karen and I got married, I set some goals for myself. They had been rolling around in my head for a while. The first was that I wanted to do something that I enjoyed for a living. Too many nights, I came home frustrated with work. We spent too much time either hashing through the issues or trying to detox from it. At first, I wasn’t sure what that something I wanted to do was, but I settled on writing fairly quickly.

I have enjoyed creating worlds and characters and situations since I was fifteen. I have enjoyed writing since sixteen. The two didn’t really come together until ten years later, which perhaps sounds odd. But I had begun working on stories by then, one of which grew into a novel. I enjoyed reading about the process of writing and creating, the systems involved, as much as I enjoyed reading and experiencing them myself.

So writing was the first and primary goal.

The second goal was a timeline. When did I want to pull the trigger on it? What was realistic? What needed to be done to make it work? I took a look at our financial situation. By far our largest expense at the time was our mortgage. Previous decisions we’d made were already in our favor. When we bought the house, we didn’t push to the limits of our finances. We had already started paying down the note early. With that expense gone and trimming back on others, we could get by on Karen’s salary alone. How long would paying off the note take? Based on the numbers, I settled on five more years.

Getting to the first goal by the time I turned thirty-five was the second goal.

The third goal was where we wanted to live. This was more nuanced and complicated. Neither of us wanted to live in Florida long term. But moving while starting a new financial situation didn’t necessarily seem like the best idea. In the end, we did a trade study of the five locations we desired or considered which included inputs like cost of living, social network and employment opportunities, plus a number of others. In the end, we found staying in Florida best fit all the inputs.

For the moment, that meant staying where we were.

And with that, my goals were in place. The next step was how to achieve them, most of which involved long-term financial independence (the F.I. in F.I.R.E. above).

The key to financial independence is simple: Live below your means.

It really is no more complicated than that. If you ask most people who have achieved it, that is the one thing you will consistently hear. Where the concept is simple, the implementation is more difficult, but again not overly complex. Most of it involves exploiting a few well-known pieces of psychology, central to which is: You don’t miss what you don’t see.

The specific ways we have done that is what this series of essays will be about.

When I was young, I didn’t think about money much, other than how far my allowance would go and how to get my parents to spring a little more. I was born into the middle class with all that means in American society, mostly comfortable material life concealed beneath a thin skin of security. Then, when I was ten, my parents divorced. That was the first of two times in my life my financial situation suddenly and radically changed without my having any control. The second was when I was a junior in college and half my funding dried up, literally overnight.

Those two experiences started me thinking a lot more about money, particularly how not to be caught short again by events beyond my control.

As I’ve grown older, I found that one of the keys to life is understanding what you can control and what you can’t. The average person changes careers five times during their life. Some of those will be by choice, others by necessity. Those choices are set against, and often influenced by, a backdrop of economic events over which we have little if any control. Mostly we notice the negative impacts, recessions, layoffs, corporate restructuring, revised business priorities, personal setbacks and outright disasters.

My grandparents survived the Great Depression, a financial disaster that defined their generation. My parents experienced Stagflation, oil embargoes, rampant inflation and the market crash of 1987, all of which colored their financial world. Since graduating college, I’ve witnessed the Savings & Loan collapse, the Emerging Market Bubble, the Tech Bubble, 9/11, the Housing Bubble and now the Great Recession. Everyone has a story, a pivotal event or person that shapes their attitudes toward money.

For some that translates into never wanting to think about money. Like children living in an idyllic, Victorian world, they assume it will always be there when they need it. Others are driven in the opposite direction, always wanting more, sometimes regardless of the cost. Like inveterate gamblers they are always on the lookout for an opportunity to get rich overnight. Some get squeamish talking about money because their parents always fought over it. To hold that memory at a distance, they opt not to discuss it at all. A few tell themselves there is no reason to stress about money. You may as well spend what you have while you have it, before something or someone comes along and takes it away, like inevitably happens. A handful want it now, regardless of the long-term consequences. They’ve earned and deserved the finer things in life right now. If they waited until they saved and could afford them, they might not be able to enjoy them.

The majority of people fall somewhere in between. They muddle through their financial lives, saving a little because they’re told they should, splurging when they get a little extra, all based on their current situation, not any real plan or understanding of where they need or want to be. Most people don’t start thinking about retirement until after they turn 40, even 50. Even then, they don’t always know how much money they need to maintain their current lifestyle, never mind realize their dreams.

Almost everyone I know wants to retire early (the R.E. in F.I.R.E. above). They all think they should be able to. But when I ask them pointed questions like whether they will be able to pay for health insurance between the time they retire and when they enroll in Medicare, most say they hadn’t considered that. Or whether they have enough to cover medical expenses during retirement. Doesn’t Medicare cover all those? Sadly, no.

What about an emergency fund? The average American doesn’t have enough savings to cover even a month of their existing expenses. Ideally, financial experts say you should have enough emergency fund to pay 3-6 months of expenses. That covers events like getting laid off, having a major health scare, or experiencing a natural disaster. Or at least a dozen other things most of us never consider possible until they happen. Life, if nothing else, is creative in the challenges it throws us.

The purpose of these essays isn’t to tell you how much money you need or really how to get it. There are tons of resources out there more than willing to tell you both. The Internet is rife with calculators that will spit out how much money you need to begin a 30-year retirement based on your current living expenses adjusted for inflation. Every individual with a Social Security number gets an annual statement of their projected benefits which includes a breakdown of ages when they can claim it. Besides, I can’t tell you what you need because everyone’s needs and goals are different.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a financial analyst. I don’t have a degree in economics, personal finance or investing. I’ve never even taken a course. I’ve read books and articles here and there because, like many people, I find money an interesting subject. So I am no expert, and nothing I say should be taken as advice (legal disclaimer).

Throughout this life, I have been fortunate to encounter people who knew a lot more about money than I ever will. All I had to do was listen and learn from their experiences. Not all of their examples were positive. But I believe you can learn from anyone, good or bad, if you are willing to. Mistakes and missteps, whether ours or someone else’s, are the most valuable lessons life has to offer.

Where has that gotten me?

We’ve been living debt-free for almost twenty-two years, when Karen and I paid off our final outstanding obligation, our mortgage. A year later, I could afford to write fulltime because my engineering income was no longer required to keep us in groceries. I’ve only looked back twice, once when Karen was diagnosed with breast cancer and again around the bottom of the Great Recession. Both times, I was considering whether I would have to return to engineering to keep us financially afloat. So in dark days of 2009, I sat down and reviewed our financial situation.

What I found surprised me. If Karen continued working until full retirement age, our retirement was already taken care of. Between social security and both of our pensions, we would have the same income as we have today, as long as those commitments were honored. On top of that, we already had the recommended savings for health care expenses during retirement along with a healthy emergency fund. That was all based on what we still had during the worst market conditions in a generation while we were living on a single salary. And we were saving over a third of that each year, with another twenty years to build up more.

I was stunned. Reviewing those numbers allowed me to sleep peacefully for the first time since the meltdown had started some six months earlier.

Even with that peace of mind, I knew life holds no guarantees. As I said, two years before Karen had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her treatment consisted of a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Without insurance, the medical bills came close to $350k. We were fortunate. We had good health insurance with catastrophic coverage. Were it not for that, we easily could have spent our entire life savings on her treatment. We have been doubly lucky in that twelve years later she remains cancer-free. But over the course of that adventure, we met many others who were not as fortunate.

Had we found ourselves in their situation, we would have been ok. It would have wiped clean the balance sheet, but likely wouldn’t have driven us into bankruptcy. And we were still relatively young (Karen was under 45 at the time). We could have started rebuilding. As it turned out, we didn’t have to. That experience once again reminded me how quickly circumstances change. This time, however, I had been financially prepared. For both of us.

It turns out we were members of the F.I.R.E. movement before it was cool, before it even had a name.

So, why exactly am I writing this?

If you are a cynic, you might say because it costs me nothing. That, at least, is true. Finances are not a zero-sum game. By telling you how we got here I am not endangering our position. If you are a pessimist, it might be because my experience is worth exactly what you pay for it. That may be true as well, but you will judge that for yourself. If you are a pop psychologist, you might say it’s because I don’t have any children to pass this information on to. There may be some truth in that, too. If you are an altruist, you might say this is my way of repaying some of the generosity I’ve received, both in money and in knowledge.

That is the closest to an answer I can come up with. I was raised to want to help others and give back some of the generosity and good fortune I’ve received. I’ve met too many people whose personal finances were a mystery to them.

I was also raised to believe you lead by example, not by telling people what to do. The story I’ll relate is based on things Karen and I have actually done, not speculation or untested advice. While I can’t say it will work for anyone else, I know it has worked for us. Time and circumstance differ. Plan accordingly.

From the onset, what has worked for us falls into four fundamental themes: planning, patience, simplicity and discipline.

Planning because I need to know my goals to know where I was going on the journey. A roadmap if you will. How could I know when I’d arrived without knowing where I was going or where I’d been?  

Patience because like any worthwhile destination, for us it took some time to get there. Change is incremental. None of this happened overnight. There were great leaps forward and setbacks. Slow and steady wins this race. It lasts a lifetime.

Simplicity because I’ve found that on a long journey it’s best to travel light. Long ago, I discovered that all the best, brightest, shiniest new toys I was hauling around were weighing me down and holding me back. It’s more than a purely philosophical principle, it’s one borne out by psychological science.

Discipline because there were definitely moments when I was tempted to turn back. Or to celebrate a minor success with a major spending spree. Resisting and staying the course, if it’s working, were crucial in achieving the goal. Parts of this were tedious and time consuming. Many times I had to convince myself to stick with it.  

The items I packed for this financial journey were relatively simple and compact: A mechanical pencil and paper notebook; a calculator; a spreadsheet; copies of our bills, expenses, mortgage, payroll and checking/savings/retirement accounts (none of which I intend to share); an online retirement calculator; and a book of compound interest, amortization and annuity tables and formulae I picked up on a whim.

In all likelihood, you already know a lot of what I’m going to tell you. To me, most of it is common sense. I don’t take credit for the originality of the ideas. As I’ve said, I gleaned information from a number of sources. But I was never taught these things in school. As with most of people, our financial experience came as OJT (on the job training). Few of us ever get formally taught how to create a budget or balance a checkbook, much less how to calculate the impact of paying just a little extra of the principal of a loan each month.

A few principles I plan to cover in the upcoming essays are budgets, priorities/mindset, the magic of compound interest, the rule of 7/10, and average S&P 500 returns.

Let me start with that last one for a minute.

For the past 90 years, the average annual returns on the S&P 500 stand at roughly 10% (9.8%, but I round it up for simplicity). Which means, the average growth of the 500 diverse companies that make up the S&P 500 index is 10% in an average year. That’s two averages, first the average of annual growth of an index of 500 companies (that change over time), the other the average of that average annual growth over 90 years. Which means it if you were to invest say $100 in an S&P 500 index mutual fund, at the end of an average year, you would have $110. Which isn’t really true but is close enough for my purposes.

The trick is realizing that there is no such thing as an average year. Some years S&P 500 returns will be less, even negative (like 2008), some years will be more, even twice as much (like 2017).

You might wonder why this is important to our personal finances. In general it isn’t, though it did become more so as we started planning for retirement. But I find 10% to be a useful marker for making financial decisions. If I can save nearly as much by a certain financial behavior as I could by theoretically investing that same money in a mutual fund that mirrors the S&P 500, it is likely the right thing to do. 10% is an exceptionally good annual return.

Now it’s easy to get carried away with this. At least one financial advisor told us that if we can get better returns by even a percent from investing in the S&P 500 (or some other investment), we should do that rather than spending that money to, say, pay off debt. A lot of analysts and advisors think the same.

I am not one of those people.

I have always favored guaranteed returns over theoretical ones. Future investment returns are always theoretical. Past performance does not predict future results. The interest you save from, say, paying off debt is always guaranteed (as long as you don’t have a pre-payment penalty). For me, that’s money in the bank.

So that was the first piece of information I tucked away as I planned out how to achieve my goals. I’ll come back to it again as I go along.

Finally, before I go, let me clear up any misconceptions.

I’m not going to tell you how to get rich quick, or really how to get rich at all. If that’s what you’re after, you’re reading the wrong essays. You may as well stop right now. I can’t help you (second legal disclaimer. Now you’ve been warned twice).

I can’t tell you how not to worry about money. Everyone worries about money, from my mother to Donald Trump.

I also won’t tell you exactly what to do. I haven’t stumbled on a step-by-step formula for spinning lead into gold. No one’s entrusted me with a set of risk-free instructions for success. Nothing in life comes with a guarantee, including these essays (third legal disclaimer. Now it’s a magic spell).

Finally, I’m not going to tell you to live like a monk, regardless of how it might seem. If I were to claim five years of complete privation would deliver people to a promised land, I’d be unlikely to find many behind me as I charged up that hill, regardless of whether I was right or not. In fact, people would be more likely to break out the torches and pitchforks and come after me. Just look at the unrest in Greece and other parts of Europe several years ago. Austerity is not in most people’s vocabularies or a realistic answer to most of their financial problems. Rarely does it work. Just ask the IMF.

What I hope to do is get you thinking about the way you see money, whether it makes you work for it or whether you make it work for you. What I intend to lay out is a lot like my Swedish grandmother’s smorgasbord. Take what you like and leave the rest behind. Or sample a bit of everything to see what you enjoy. Or treat it like a potluck and bring something new and tasty to the table. Or just oow and ah politely as you look at the pretty spread, realizing you have healthier food at home.

Although, no matter which course you choose, I recommend you at least try the meatballs. They are kind of a specialty and I’m told they’re pretty good.

© 2019 Edward P. Morgan III

Afterword (Winter Solstice 2018)

Afterword (Winter Solstice 2018) - a reading (on Google Drive)

By the river in the returning rainforest, the camp stands empty, its ghosts cautiously creeping toward daylight like flowers on the razor wire. All conflicts end. But only after their suffering has become intolerable and indefensible. By then, too many lives, too much potential has been lost. The carnage cannot easily be undone. The old growth forest may have been replanted after clear-cutting but untold generations need to pass unhindered to recover what’s now missing. Generations of temptation to forget and resume that grim harvest, likely over some perceived or prejudicial slight. The distrust between trees and axmen run as deep as sap and steel. But columbine doves emerge from eagle claws in the artificial alpine meadows. Their green now camouflages the assembly ground between the towers even as their purple occasionally brightens or bruises the mounds tucked behind the weatherworn barracks, depending on the light. In the same shifting sense, the truth of what happened here remains as difficult to establish as reconciliation.

Witnesses needing answers to unlock their lurid past tour the inhumane monument which whispers: Are you seeking me? Are you seeking the key? For some, entry remains locked and barred behind an iron door of denial. For others, the maze of collapsed tunnels beneath the wire confuses them. Did the prisoners tunnel out or did we eventually tunnel in? Did the monsters reside before or behind the wire? Did they don the uniforms we remember, or simply raise hands to temples as blinders against the dirty, anguished faces they never seemed to see in some kind of informal salute? There is little beauty in this truth, and little truth that acknowledges their victims’ beauty. The ode inscribed above the entry celebrates artifice over artistry, a cruel joke cast in statutory iron. If that gateway opens into a gallery, it’s a theater of performance art. The somber enforced silence in the audience chamber echoes like a tomb.

Masked by greasy smoke, shrouded by dirt like a fresh laid grave, some look but cannot see as history complains: Your delusion's killing me. Distant visitors cast their eyes about in righteous pity, certain in their hearts nothing like this could happen where they live. They would never starve a population into subjugation. They would never abuse a child for the circumstances of her birth. They would never torture a woman to make an ideological point. They would never eradicate entire peoples to attain a little cultural living room. They would never claim their former friends and neighbors as anesthetic vermin or chattel. But they would fight. Always, they say they would fight. They would never board the buses quietly, only reddened tooth and nail, at least until instructed to rejoin the tour. Or they would stand to be counted, damn the cost, damn the consequences, damn their unrelenting cowardice, just like their mythic, iconized ancestors. Conveniently, they avert their eyes from the looking glass of their own past, too dark, distant and tarnished to be relevant. Empathy remains elusive. It’s easier to sympathize with pain received than to ponder pain inflicted.

In the shadows of misty killing fields and murky crematoria, the pain isn't real unless you invoke it, like the memory of a people's loss. Pain begets pain more often than its stepchild solace. Our pain is ours alone, not shared to be comforted. The specters of our allies become suspect because of they lack the magnitude of our suffering, the depth of our ragged scars. Never mind that they stood beside us against the advancing shield wall while most merely watched from darkened alleyways behind that thin blue line. Life feeds on life. Only fully sated does it pause to mourn what’s missing. The spell of each epileptic episode endures, casting an illusion over the landscape, softening its edges with night and fog. Phantasms move in moonlight, some heroes, some villains, some shifting between, often indistinguishable by the shadows they lay down. As we stand chained in the center of the maze below, they are all we have to distinguish their true nature, good from evil, right from wrong. Until we unbind ourselves from the blank wall before us and turn to face the fire behind. Momentarily its brilliance might blind us but eventually our eyes adjust.

Like the diamond that cuts the knife, the image of a mound of moldering, headless dolls slices through the gathered ignorance of men. Here lies all that remains of a generation of mothers and their daughters, a post-modern gravestone. Here their captors offhandedly piled the magnitude of their loss. Each girl had been allowed only one to give her comfort and keep her quiet through her journey to the underworld. What became of the doll heads, none of the meticulous ledgers say. Perhaps the oppressors feared those heads would speak and bear witness where none of their victims could. Perhaps they were afraid they concealed unclean thoughts that might be passed to the next generation. Perhaps they served as a warning only a child would understand. Or perhaps, like their owners, their usefulness was done. With no eyes, they cannot see. With no ears, they cannot hear. With no mouths, they cannot scream.

Tattooed by scars that will never fade, bystanders emerge into the light of reconciliation understanding the future belongs to the brave. Some testify against erstwhile friends and neighbors. Some recount small acts of kindness, the everyday heroics that offer hope. A few bear witness to missing martyrs, joining in collaboration to piece together the puzzle of their fractured lives where no one else remains. The most courageous admit their guilt and seek mercy but not through understanding. Their bare their shame for all to see like a red triangle pinned upon their chests. Their belated tears cannot wash the landscape clean. Even heavy rains now only muddy this once fertile ground. Unsatisfied with their suffering, the righteous mob exhumes stones from the exercise yard. Eager for retaliation and retribution, they mirror the other's tactics. Stained glass houses shatter like fragile crystal throughout the night.

Crucified by nails of complicity and silence, they swear an oath of Never Again, knowing promises, like lives, can be bought so very cheap. But each generation slips a little further from the memory that spawned that vow. First the survivors, then the witnesses, then the daughters, the granddaughters, all the aunties and the children who listened enraptured on their knees. Until the past shifts restlessly in its grave like a creature neither alive nor fully dead. We attempt to enshrine these events by erecting holidays as sacred monuments, convinced that one day, the oppressors will all wake up on the wrong side of history. Or, alternately, that one day we will all wake up in shallow graves.

But we have to ask ourselves, do we remember to help stoke the hatred of our enemies? Or do we remember to fill the holes in our hearts because of the pictures in our heads? If the latter, we will heal through our compassion. If the former, we would be better off burning this wine-stained book.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Bound by Blood and Wine (Samhain 2018)

Bound by Blood and Wine (Samhain 2018) - a reading (on Google Drive)

In a time when Christ and his saints slept in silence, a child rearranges pieces of a personal mythology to make sense of his battered life. The new camp lies nestled by the lake of bulrushes, a segregation center run by the Relocation Authority for the sons of wayward daughters. Their land, language and religion are not his own. He longs for the distant apple orchard, but the idylls of early captivity remain shrouded by night and fog. At thirteen, he graduated to the five-strand, eight-tower, double daily count, one room stalls when he failed the first reading of their loyalty questionnaire. Deemed too unalloyed and immaleable to die in their righteous cause, he resides in Camp Ten until his mind changes, or he ages out to the nearby labor unit a few short years away.

Beyond his barracks door lies a demesne marked "here be dragons," a feral land filled with savage, unpredictable people. But unlike his cohabitants and coconspirators, he hears stories in the susurrant voices that fill the shivering darkness and alternating sweatbox heat. Stories once whispered by the aunties in the apple orchard, implacable and indefatigable even in defeat. Or sung in their native tongues by the bronzed Adonis work-gang prisoners on their long march to the surrounding farms and fields. He fills a cloth-bound, black-market notebook with his internal monologue, his contraindicated, contraband musings staining its unbleached pages with homemade ink bound by blood and wine. Real or imagined, the voices carve fresh passageways in his already fractured mind.

The iron door creaks open and falls the shadow of Medea or her minotaur of divine retribution across the threshold of his bifold maze. They rampage through his cell in search of proscribed words, piling all the puzzle pieces in the center of the room. The notebook he secrets in a hole beneath a trapdoor in the floor. He constructs plausible worlds and timelines from the fragments, fitting one into another in any way he can. Each name, each whispered rumor, each half-told tale he notes in code with an enigmatic key soon even he no longer remembers. As they rage through his chamber, he tunnels for the trees beyond the wire, longing for the shelter of their slender green arms. Beyond the forest rise the mountains. If he can reach them, perhaps one day they will lift him to the stars. Daylight is mostly safe. Darkness requires sanctuary.

With a voice for every muse and mood of the poly-polar hydra, the devil's brood pursues him through the long, subconscious corridors. He hides like a thief in spider-laden alcoves, nooks and niches, curling up tightly like a cat in the crevices and cubbyholes etched into the crumbling mortar. As he holds his breath waiting for the fetid monsters to stumble by, he populates the worlds which will greet him when he emerges. He fills them with heroic figures, iconic people he imagines, like himself, fierce underdogs forced to make a desperate stand. When he gets caught outside a hidey-hole, he bares his sword of polished bronze just long enough to draw blood. He leans heavily on the darkness, and hit and run tactics. Strike and move. He is well outnumbered. He cannot win a standup fight.

With each Pyrrhic victory comes the reckoning at the hot gates, him with no three hundred, only a contingent of unremembered Thespians. His narration becomes unstable, confused and unreliable. Each story blends into another. True or invented, his or someone else’s, he no longer knows. His only focus now is survival, caught in an open cavern between underground mountains and a sunless sea. He forms up a shield wall across the narrow passage as the minotaur approaches with his servants of the double ax, the arche of creation scything the air before him. He offers to settle the battle in the old way, mano a mano, or literally hand to hand. He steps forward like a bull dancer, unarmed and naked to the waist. The Minotaur ducks its head and bull-rushes. With a headlong leap ending in a handstand, he grasps it by the horns. Poised between doom and dilemma, its fetid breath rises up to greet him. Instinctively, the beast snaps its head, somersaulting him over and safely out of reach. He rolls to his feet and runs again. The Minotaur snorts its outrage and turns to charge. Its hooves pound close behind.

Bruised but unbroken, he relies on time and chance to escape the labrys with no Daedalus or Ariadne to guide him from its blade. Embraced by darkness in the narrow, twisting corridors, he resumes his guerrilla game of hide-and-seek. He leans upon the companions he carries with him. Their tales are the inspiration he follows. Where their stories draw blank, he fills in the gaps, sometimes generation by generation. Names and histories emerge. Their world begins to move without his thinking, like an orrery set in motion by the hidden musings of a water clock. Their dialogue flows through his head unbidden. Hungry, desperate and alone, he listens to their whispered advice. He doubles back along a twisting goat trail to retrieve his tunic and lost sword. The sword he sharpens and cinches back to his waist. The tunic he unravels. Through ill-remembered corridors, he lays a slender thread of plotline he hopes will eventually guide him home.

To escape, first he must survive. He overlays a world map onto the warren, renaming each cavern and corridor for cities and canyons in the wilderness to craft landmarks in the shifting darkness. He repeats snippets of his half-remembered narrative like a mantra, urging himself on by his heroes’ examples. Through victories and setbacks, blind corridors and backtracks, he relentlessly moves forward, winding and unwinding the thread each way he explores, knotting a loop at each dead-end junction. Lichens and lurid mushrooms become his sustenance. Rivulets and runoff filtered by mossy walls become his wine. Resting by shallow looking glass pools of ruddy luminescence, he transcribes the episodic tales that occupy his mind, writing and rewriting until the margins of his notebook overflow with corrections, as its cover grows stained by the wounds that leech from his surroundings. Until he hears hoofbeats echoing near, strikes camp and slips away, hiding within himself to survive another night.

After a decade of string fragments slipping through his fingers, he escapes the twilight labyrinth and is blinded by the sun in splendor. The distant mountains sparkle like multifaceted gemstones; the leaves in the nearby forest shine like polished jade. The camp and its ordeals now lay behind him. He refuses to look back. All he needs to remember he carries with him. In his hand, he clutches a wine-stained book.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Second Sight (Fall Equinox 2018)

Second Sight - a reading (on Google Drive)

From the embers a demon arises, an eight-fold chorus harmonizing with each weapon in its hands, echoes and artifacts of an evil undefeated. Like an unholy archetype, the Righteous will not die. The sweeping victory of the seven sisters only forced them into reclusive slumber until the acts of man once again drew them forth from their long, deep hibernation, renamed and reincarnated, their numbers undiminished. They now call themselves the Chosen. The counter-revolution their ancestors sparked so long ago was not easily undone, the forest not easily reseeded after their clear cutting and slash-and-burn viniculture. The acidic ash lay fallow until, watered by tears of envy for an illusive Arthurian empire long lost, it fertilized the grapes of wrath, ripened to near bursting, ready to be crushed. Even now their red vinegar once again stains the tongues of man. Only a single descendent of the seven sisters still lives to stand against them, the youngest daughter of youngest daughters tracing back seven generations to Martyred Mary. She bears the birthmark of Alcy the Fallen, a kingfisher above her breast. Her blood is all that remains untainted of their original res publica vision. But their armor ill fits her. She is a poet not a warrior. A philosopher not a prophet. She seeks sympathy and common ground through treaties and beneficial trade. When those inevitably fail, her reluctant call to arms comes across as more cipher than clarion.

The Chosen gather. A legion of the faithful stand against the prophecy unleashed, an immortal ethernaut sent to raze their souls to god. She has none of the subtly and guise of her grande dames, none of their martial prowess. She marches her meager army out according to the histories, a vanguard, center, two wings and a reserve. The pueblas have little cavalry so rely on a native contingent who pledged their support after their own blunted revolution farther north. Bands bearing distant names like Cheyenne and Sleeping Buffalo. Once they had been equal allies. Now they are auxiliaries. She positions their scant numbers to cover her flanks. The Chosen had taken up positions first, facing dusk. The sun reflects off their armor, making the sky before the ranks of women catch fire. They murmur it’s an ill omen. But when the battle is joined, it’s the Chosen center that does not hold. A cheer arises. She presses her advantage and pushes forward, just like the histories say. It seems too easy. But perhaps this is exactly how her forbearers won. She only realizes her mistake too late when the Chosen center turns and fights, their retreat a feint. The sun across their polished shields covered the sweeping charge of their cavalry hidden behind their lines. Their horses scattered her wan allies. The Chosen wings now press her flanks, with their cavalry behind. Her veterans fight valiantly but already sense their doom. The women would rout if they weren’t already encircled. As night descends, only crows and the Chose celebrate the field.

Wounded beyond grieving among the army of the dead, she is lured into the shadow of an ancient shrine by the mystery of a whisper. How she slips through the Chosen pickets, she does not know. She just follows a voice in the darkness that softly calls her name. Sophia. Sophia. Behind her, the distant lamentation of no quarter asked or given transforms into a raven’s song until an anti-chorus of crows lends it the quality of children’s cries. By moonlight, she spies the ruins of the square tower in the mountains. To achieve its sanctuary, she must first navigate the field of broken crosses. Their tiny, jagged arms rend her clothing and deeply etch her armor until her fingertips grieve with blood. Within the crumbling shelter of the tower walls, she gathers deadwood and strikes a fire. Her only goal now to survive and keep the candle lighted for another generation. Her little blaze mimics the twinkling bonfires on the battle plane below. She prays that death has been sated by the offerings and remains too drowsy to come seeking more. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of that carnage, she buries her face within her hands until the teardrops from her fingertips run clear.

She strips away her armor at the altar of an unnamed god, feeding it to the wishfire, beseeching an intercession to restore her savaged faith. Her weapons she drops beside it, believing them useless and unnecessary. Naked and ashamed she confronts the disaster her reign has ushered in. That gentle voice whispers the fault is not hers to bear alone. She ignores it. Her mind is wracked with dreams and nightmares, visions of black or white. The voices of her ancestors insisting you are either with us or against us. No dissent. No middle way. Their shrill chorus alienates their allies by casting them as enemies while expecting them to understand. What they understood instead was that their aid was no longer needed, their alliance no longer valued. Their fight had become theirs alone. Her night is a pain filled crucible of tempering by self-recrimination. She glimpses a future where all their causes are defeated in detail. How can she conquer unrelenting human nature?

She awakes alone in cold confusion to find a dreamcypher inscribed across her mind. Arcane words unbind an avatar. A martyr is unborn. The voices inform her what she must do to seek redemption. She smears herself with ashes mixed with blood that now become her armor. She takes up her weapons and hones their dull edges back to razor sharp. In the foothills, she gathers what remains of her forces, guerrillas and refugees drawn to her light as they flee the mountain fastnesses. Rumors that the puebla army had fallen spread faster than a plague. The voices instruct her to bide her time and wait. Not long. On the plane below, the Chosen shift their attention to Cheyenne and begin to march. Slowly so the terror of their coming precedes them, pressing the city’s will to crumble to obviate the necessity of siege. With a cadre reminiscent of the old days, warriors, witches and ingénues, she tracks them along the ridgeline. She can only pray her erstwhile allies see their situation clearly. After Cheyenne, their only the remaining camp is Sleeping Buffalo filled with their sick, wounded, elderly and young. And it cannot be fortified. But not their women. The example of her puebla empire taught them that at least. Their scattered cavalry regroups within the walls. Their hope forlorn, they stake themselves to the land to fight just as the voices said they would. The Chosen invest the city. Her camp remains cold and fireless to conceal her presence. The voices order her to hold fast until the moment the native cavalry sally from behind the walls, as the histories say they must.

From a hill beyond their ruined temple, astrologers record her descent as a tear down the face of god, the telemetry of a fallen angel. Alone, she would set fire their camp then destroy their half-built siege engines and retreat. Hit and run. Scatter them then cut them down in the passes. That’s what the histories say. The voices reject her caution. Now is the time to impale them from behind while their attention is fixed forward. Use her full weight as shock tactics to savage their exposed back. A lightning strike to show the besieged city that their allies have not forsaken them. She knows her forces may well not survive the impact. But for too many generations, the puebla have neglected their allies in favor of themselves. It’s time to rebalance the equation, through sacrifice if necessary. She aims her spear at the heart of their gathered leaders and lets gravity do the rest. Their defiant charge catches the Chosen completely unaware. By the time they hear the thunder of hoofbeats rolling downhill, the lance is thrust too deep.  She and her companions lay waste to their captains and lieutenants. Decapitated, their army begins to melt away, first a trickle, then a torrent.

Miraculously, Sophia and her companions survive. When she links up with the leader of Cheyenne war band, it’s she who dismounts and bends her knee. The voices reveal that her redemption is not yet complete. In the aftermath, she refuses to reassume her position of rulership. The pueblas are restive but cautious of her recent erratic actions. Her desperate charge based on the counsel of unseen advisors has already attained a legendary quality, part myth, part cautionary tale. As her last official act, she decrees the puebla empire will rebuild as a true res publica. To repair the alliance, she and her veteran cadre vow to remain and guard Cheyenne until the next generation can replace their fallen warriors. The Chosen have once again been sown to the wind, diminished but not defeated. The voices warn her they are destined to return, beneath a different banner, bearing a different name. She must remain vigilant. The cycles of the histories will continue unceasing.

So in victory she becomes Unchosen, a sibylline warrior cursed by whispers of her renunciation until the voices fade beyond her second sight.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Seven Sisters (Lughnasa 2018)

Seven Sisters (Lughnasa 2018) - a reading (on Google Drive)

As snowmelt trickles into the cisterns high in the mountains, a once noble line plots retaliation against a long-standing familial slight. In a square tower built onto a narrow ledge set against the cliffs, seven sisters use that ancient grievance to whet their vengeance. Each had sworn an oath to her mother, as she had sworn to her mother before, to exact not mere retribution but a watershed transformation to end the judicially sanctioned kidnappings, enslavements, heresy and flight. They have well-worn reputations as warriors, witches and ingénues. Older, wiser men tell them they cannot succeed. They aren’t strong enough, aren’t skilled enough, aren’t aggressive enough. Aren’t ruthless enough. In the way of all youth, the sisters do not believe them. They nurse their righteous hatred like an ill-begotten child.

Where the air is clear and untainted, priests perform divergent rituals, one to steal a glimpse of heaven's mirror, the other to enslave it. Conflicting visions emerge, ones that have to be rolled and hammered in the furnace of a conclave before the old, wise men will concede their blessing. Even from beyond the bricked up chamber, the sisters leave nothing to chance. Favors are recalled, debts repaid, barters exchanged, bribes expended, blackmails extorted. Slowly, reluctantly, their blade is beaten into shape. Each layer presses closely to the next, iteration after iteration with only small variances between, until a strong, supple weapon has been crafted. Once the old, wise men are set free, carefully tailored messages flow into the valleys, each meant to resonate with a different faction of the powerless and oppressed. The time has come. This earth is yours to inherit. God wills it.

Women gather, called by complementary visions, armed and armored to sweep downhill from their strongholds to reclaim the fertile fields below. They give over the care of their infants and toddling children to the purple clad aunties and grandmothers in the refuges. The sisters train these young women for their yearslong mission. They wed them to their weapons, some borrowed, some blued, some newly founded, some extracted from ancient Eden. By the end of spring, the sisters deem them worthy. They march on the provincial capital, bypassing its townships and outposts. They neither bind their gender nor reveal it, except perhaps in the ponytails bobbing at their backs like the pennons of their cause. They do not attack, lay siege or even announce their intentions. They use the strength and condescension of the garrison against itself. They infiltrate by night, weak, desperate, unguarded and alone. By morning, the city kneels at their feet after a mostly bloodless coup. The sightless eyes of the worst oppressors peer out above the gates. The more pragmatic get co-opted or conscripted. The sisters know some bide their time while others await the dice to fully come to rest. They find a place for both within their Reconquista.

Too few to enforce their claim by steel alone, the sisters court each new city through a combination of divine blessings and treachery into relinquishing the chastity of its gates. They do not use the same ruse twice. In one they foment an internal uprising through targeted assassination. In another, they bribe the burghers with promises of free trade or other wiles. In a third, they simply slit the throats of the watchmen and gatekeepers, and replace them with their own. While not a preference, they shy away from neither blood nor pain. The Righteous brand them Lunatics. The sisters turn that name to their advantage. They commission musicians to compose the Ballad of Diana, the huntress with her bow. They have it sung in speakeasies and backroom bars until it is whistled and hummed in back alleys like an anthem. Throughout the lowlands, Diana’s light becomes an ill omen, an unwarded evil eye. Her sibylline faces become known by different names. Wolf moon, huntress moon, blood moon, each representing another city fallen into the sisters orbit through their ever-shifting tactics.

Soon, their reputation alone unlocks the granaries and armories needed to transform a forgotten res publica into a puebla empire backed by mountains and the sky. Belatedly, the Righteous awaken to the threat. They enact a scorched-earth policy, burning their own harvest to starve out the rebellion. They cobble together confederacies and covenants based on interlocking Machiavellian interests and self-serving lies. When the sisters push, they give ground, only to strike back along their well exposed flanks. Vulnerable, the sisters are forced to retrench until they occupy only their initial three conquests. The first snow sees them watching warily from behind their walls, sharpening their weapons, plotting their spring campaign. In the darkness of the new year’s first new moon, the Righteous send their black balaclava-clad commandos on a lightning raid against the aunties and infants in the mountain strongholds. The histories do not record their intent only their execution. Soldiers on leave reacquainting themselves with their children repulse the raids in eight pueblas with heavy losses. In the ninth, a slaughter of the innocents of biblical proportions ensues. Among the martyred, the youngest sister dispatched in desperation to shore up the square tower’s defense. Her remaining siblings seize on the act as a Righteous Children’s Crusade. New elegies are commissioned, new requiems are sung. Grindstones hone fresh grievances until they glint like razors.

By spring, silver fills the treasuries, ploughshares overflow the forges, raw materials for new, untarnished conquests standing ready to be transmuted. Donations and bribes, some carried from farmsteads and townships begging for their protection, other smuggled from fallen cities desperate to be reclaimed. The sisters convene a war council. They lay out the map and study the web of interdependencies the Righteous have created. A plan emerges. The sisters begin seeding provisions throughout the passes and canyons. Their agents establish contact with prospective allies. The Righteous do not rest either. In an opening gambit just before the final frost, their provocateurs seize the weakest of the sisters’ cities from within. In response, its population rises, armed with castoff weapons and guerilla tactics. When the street fighting subsides three days later, the sisters have regained control. At the cost of the middle member of their sorority. A second loss does little to temper their resolve. Once again they call a conclave. This time, the old, wise men dare not brick themselves inside. They let the sisters enter. They let the sisters speak. The second sister’s rhetoric captivates the chamber. This year, the priests quickly bless their venture. They, too, have suffered loss. Fresh recruits stream to the mountain strongholds. None of the veteran cadres waiver. The tiny crosses overlooking the training ground reinforce the price of any failure.

After the depletions of winter and the destruction of the bulk of last year’s harvest, the Righteous press for a single, decisive battle. The sisters plan to give it to them. They gather their green army, backed by just enough veterans to form a core. The eldest three sisters lead them to the field, a prize too tempting for the Righteous to ignore. Once the unholy army marches out to meet them, the pueblas adopt Fabian tactics in the mountains and high passes, refusing battle while resupplying from their caches. Overeager, the Righteous pursue them farther and farther from their base. With the enemy forces fully engaged, the two youngest sisters lead the bulk of the veteran cadres to seize a keystone city along the Righteous supply route. Backed by silver from the treasury, the younger pair threaten to roll up their supply lines through barter, bribes and coercion. With their lines of communication threatened, the Righteous belatedly turn to secure their territory. The puebla army sets upon them from behind. Caught between hammer and anvil, the Righteous army first retreats then routs, leaving the province empty. One by one, a string of city-states falls into the sisters’ hands, pearls once connected by a twisted thread of alliances now deftly severed and unknotted.

For generations, no one dared challenge these women and their daughters in their pueblas backed by mountains and the sky. The sisters did not believe in some Righteous god. They did not believe in fate. They believed that any divinity worth naming helps those who help themselves, through force of will if necessary. They believed in the knowledge their mothers and grandmothers preserved. The knowledge that they could change the world if they set it in their minds.

Their names, carved into the living rock beneath the ruins of the square tower, still inspire a mixture of fear and awe in everyone who reads them. Those deeply chiseled names are all that remains on this earth of the seven sisters once they ascended from their mountains to the sky.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Your Resistance (Summer Solstice 2018)

Your Resistance (Summer Solstice 2018) - a reading (on Google Drive)

It begins with a slaughter, ripened lives plucked in bunches like fresh strawberries until red runnels indelibly stain the hand of God. Whose forces are they? You no longer know. You’ve lost track of all the revolutions and counter-revolutions which now harvest undeclared souls across the Dantean landscape. Not that it matters when they seize you like property, like chattel, once your guardians and incompliant companions lay face down in a roadside ditch, liberated by the wrath of their terrible swift sword. The Righteous present you with a simple choice, a false act of freewill: join the others or survive. Looking back from your long march into captivity, you suspect you chose unwisely.

Your existence becomes a daily humiliation of servitude and silence, your face an expressionless enigma required to survive. You are marked by the serpent. The scars of its fangs stand red upon your exposed neck like a scarlet letter inscribed in Braille. Are they the hallmark of your original sin? Or an abbreviation for the vulgarity of your gender? Each night you dream of liberation, a return to the way things were before, until you recognize your dreams are mere princess fantasies, deceptive expectations. No white knight, no charming prince will ride to your rescue. The best you can hope for is a roughhewn woodsman to carve you from the belly of this beast in some bloody parody of birth. No, you carry your fate buried deep within the basket concealed beneath your cloak, red-stained and tattered from your enforced submission. In order to resist, first you must survive. Only then can you subvert their vision.

A slave not of choice but conscience, you retreat each day to a sanctuary of memory against the ritual nightmare your evenings have become. Anything to keep yourself from being brainwashed by their mind numbing lessons and their mind numbing prayers. Their mind numbing gospels so full of lies that justify their abuse. Each night you recite every formula you’ve ever memorized like a mantra. F = ma. E = mc². d = vt + ½(at²). Force, energy and distance, how far away can you get, how much energy it will it require, how much force will your small frame endure. A dependent dance of mass, acceleration and velocity. You can’t have one without the others. None exist in isolation. All tangled up with time. Of course, time. But like God playing dice with the universe, time does not choose sides.

High above the pool of your subconscious, a sparkling jewel draws your fingers onward, upward, grasping for a heaven far beyond your reach. Moons, planets, comets, stars, an escape so distant and shielded by the desperate cold of space that they risk their own horrific deaths if they pursue you. If they can even identify the single point of light you’ve chosen amongst the multitude that re-adorn the nighttime sky since their darkness descended. You know its name, its classification, its spectrum, its orbital eccentricities. Warm yellow light, oxygen and water. Maslow’s foundation of what you need to survive. You intend to climb the hierarchy of his pyramid block by block given opportunity as long as you remain stranded here. Or if not climb it, boost your progeny back to the pinnacle from which you’ve fallen. Given the fundamentals of biology, you know that one day soon you will face a smaller reflection of yourself who will look to you for guidance. Until then, you subvert their righteous designs through the illusion of submission, a gravitational lensing, the bending of the light until they see only what they wish to see. Your science forms the buttress of your cathedral, your phantasmal destination its sanctuary, your place of greater safety.

You lock the formulae of your old profession in a Chinese puzzle box, inscribed in ink their superstitions can never wash away, unspoken. To write these sacred truths is heresy, to speak them witchcraft. The end result would be the same. A trial by fire. A trial by water. A trial by steel. A trial by blood. Alone, with no peers in evidence and no armored champion adorned with a token of your favor, you can win none. But working the secret mechanisms in your mind distracts your body from the rigors of your newly assigned profession, one considerably older than the one you claimed before. Or was it? How long have women lain on their backs, gazing at the heavens as they plot their escape from this mortal coil? How long have they needed to believe in a skyward paradise as a reward for enduring this hell called Earth? How long have they prayed for guardian angels who never come, only fallen ones? Eventually your box reopens, its secrets safely glittering inside, waiting to be recited as the dramatic tension reaches its climax.

An angelic choir drones out your inner voice, the drumbeat of their wings a dirge silenced only by a blade beaten from their tarnished halos. You work a damascene riddle of steel, its fluid, wavelike pattern another signpost on your journey to that farther shore. You polish its rippled edge to a mirrored razor, ready to excise any logic flaws and cognitive biases from your thinking even as it incises the methodical mathematics of cold equations into your memory. You trace the sacred scars of integrals and differentials across your mind like decorative tattoos, or runic symbols in an ancient alphabet you were forced to memorize so long ago. How long? A lifetime now, maybe two. But you can’t afford to lose that knowledge for the life that might soon stir within you. You can’t allow the poetry of that universal language, of that universal truth, to be drowned out by their righteous song celebrating blood and death pounding in your ears. You grip the blade tightly to keep your hands from shaking as you discipline the malice in your mind to serve your will.

You murder their beliefs each dawn and dusk, twin twilights of your heresy, with a scalpel driven by the science of self-determination. You reclaim the Latin of their rituals to create a laudatory vesper, a praise of the evening star. Venus rising in the west. Galileo’s girlfriend. You ensure none of their ideological seeds takes hold, no rootstock remains. Only a clear, clean, flowering garden, walled off against their righteous weeds of prejudice and hate. A playpen for your daughter where she might grow and climb as high as her mother’s memories will take her. And her daughter higher, and her daughter higher still, generation by generation until Maslow’s summit is once again transcended and the stars are back within their reach.

While it wasn’t you who set loose the horsemen from this Pandoran box, only you can secure the lid on hope as you await your opportunity to unleash it.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

The Looking Glass Revolution (Beltane 2018)

The Looking Glass Revolution - a reading (on Google Drive)

After years of living on if and if I'd tried, I took up the hammer of insurgency against the velvet tyranny of your popular distractions. Long had your supporters hunted in dark, shorthaired packs, refusing to renounce indefensible words, shouting down reasonable dialog, careening the conversation between righteous outrage and the inane. We learned the danger only slowly, after mass casualties had nearly silenced a generation. In response, we forced a daily Hobson’s choice between increasingly militant camps where ours seemed more inclusive. As the rise of your current regime had taught us, we would no longer tolerate compromise or common ground. And so we occupied and defended an increasingly dystopian no man’s land to which so many had been exiled.

My destiny began as an involuntary dream, a vision, a speechless dissent to your defense of freedom disguised in flights of predatory arms. You unleashed an autonomous army of botnets, drones, and windup trolls preprogrammed to seek and destroy even the whisper of implied opposition, laying waste to our feeds. At first we gathered information. We absorbed the attacks, wave after wave, meme after meme, until pinpricks from our lurking spiders slowly poisoned our tormentors. We paralyzed those whose bandwidth we consumed before wrapping them in dark web silk. The rest we reprogrammed and returned to infiltrate your bunker complexes. When we finally raised our battle pennon and issued our clarion call of insurrection, your Potemkin villages were quickly overrun.

Mirroring your impassioned words and martyrdom, I found myself in your reflection, waking as an echo of your dogmatic and Machiavellian Narcissus. We studied your decades-old tactics. We memorized your well-publicized playbook. We learned to shape our appeals clearly, concisely and within limits. We mastered mocking you in 140 characters. We discovered how to inspire the crowds, incite the mob. We transformed your feeds into battlegrounds. We waged war across the electronic terrain. Hashtags became our weapons of mass destruction. No statement was left unchallenged, no affront uncontested, no protest unmolested. We fought fire with fire, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Claw with reddened claw. We parried each nativist thrust with populist reposts.

Conforming to your world of archetypes and insubstantial symbols, I left my reasoning for dead, recruiting in Technicolor and raw emotion. Hungry for conflict after so many years beneath your iron heel, the powerless and oppressed flocked to our multicolored banner. Our numbers swelled until we were finally ready to go to toe to toe, mano a mano, ceding no ground even tactically. Stand and die. When you unleashed your priests and demons, we responded with scientists and facts. When you wrapped yourself in the politics of patriotism, we transformed them into kneeling, pussy-hatted protests. When you marshaled around your red-crossed white flag of purity, we rallied beneath our rainbow standard. When you let slip armed nationalists and hooded supremacists, we set loose masked anarchists and brightly bandanaed antifa. We bruised each other black for blue until old wounds broke open and the world ran red.

Now we stand together, an invisible army thousands strong, misfits and mutants of your ethical borderlands, the children of useless science. Secure in our superior knowledge, we abandoned its methods, rigor and fact-checking in favor of exposing hypocrisy through guilt and shame. We set our hounds on the scent of influence and corruption, no matter how tenuous the connections. We barded their flanks in spikes and leather armor. We no longer called them off once they’d latched their teeth. Fomenting a constitutional crisis, we countered amendment for amendment. When you attacked the first, we attacked the second, pitting fundamental right against perceived privilege. When those offensives finally stalled, we returned to undermining your entrenched positions. Like you, in the background we spun vast, intricate conspiracy theories of our own. We crafted our memes and mythologies based on popular misconceptions. We resumed our battle like ancient hourglassed and violined spiders across a common web.

As we plot our way to your destruction and chart a popular resistance front, we forced your generals to concede the map is not the territory. We secured the flanks, right and left coasts, then starved out the breadbasket through slash-and-burn economics. An uncivil war thus engaged, we unleashed our most powerful ideological weapon, a doppelganger resurrected from the crucible of your golden fear of red. Crafted from the clay of your native soil, our Committee of Public Safety terrorized your heartland. Surrounded by imaginary enemies and outside influences of our own creation, we stood poised to reclaim our birthright. But our soulless golem took on an unholy life of its own. It understood no celebratory cries of victory, no calls for measured restraint. Between us we have raised a generation on no quarter asked, no sanctuary given. And so, like its Bohemian predecessor, it finally turned on its creator. Spiderlings feeding on their magna mater, rebellious sons supplanting their bloodied paterfamilias.

And so the wheel spins until the spokes we cling to return us to where we’d started, prince to prince, pauper to pauper. Or in our case bound to a waterwheel of injustice undershot by the currents of counterrevolution. After the enlightenment of your waterboarding, I now see that our gilded ladder of Jacobean insurrection was undermined by resting on the foundation of your insurgent tower of Babel. Who you see as Satan, the prince of darkness, we call Lucifer, a lord of light. Cogito ergo sum in inferno. Abandon all hope, you who enter here. But better to reign in hell than serve in heaven where, as your gatehouse reminds us, arbeit macht frei. At least cast out we shall remain eternally free. Captured and at the mercy of your restraints, I now know my fate, the fate of all who oppose your benevolent oppression. I'll drown facing you.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III