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The Spectacle of Fearsome Acts This is about you. And about the love-cry the world makes as a kingpin in a Mexican drug cartel disembowels a woman and man, then commits an unspeakable act upon the corpses before finally hanging them beneath a bridge in Cuernavaca. Wall Street indices tick by the whole time, the expelled breath of profit after forbearance, and sometimes I want until I erupt— like when I type the phrase "Mexican hangings in Cuernavaca" and Google it (because my discursive mind wants an answer) and am directed to a site where a woman is having intercourse. Metaphorically, a carnival of flame is always about to ignite. Somewhere at the heart of that soon-to-be burning is a monk dowsed in some volatile liquid. A presence with a death wish, dry and serviceable matches, and the attention of all Creation. The monk is that part of us wanting what it wants, a faithless Charlton Heston in a city of zombies. It's simple math, really, subtracting our improbable sci-fi future from death and then from a cauldron labeled The Spectacle of Fearsome Acts wherein bubbles a consommé of pain that is recognizable. Such pain spreads through us with some force, sparking neural pathways that are choc-full of the traffic of hope. I see two nests of taut black ropes as one face of the world. I see the dangling legs of the corpses as the dead waving. These will never set foot on any part of this planet again but glare down upon a great movie-set of faithlessness— such violence may be one way of getting even with God for the retelling of a remarkable lie, which will be, once and for all, the Living Fountain turned off but left lighted. I see starlight flash from the belt buckle of someone's son, a brother, and from the open eyes of a murdered wife-to-be. I see the rough edge of things engolden everywhere at once. Copyright (c) 2012 Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.