3-16-2022

And on the last day, when death came - what they promised without end continued on limping behind the scenes and the conductor looked around knowing that he had been deserted. All the devils were absent and he was left alone in the Hell he had built for them. Judgement came down from the rafters of the theatre and whistling through the trees, through golden afternoon sunset, was the sickening, piercing sound of justice at least a dagger - et tu? to no one. Judgement comes when utter loneliness leaves the sinner vulnerable to the circling white vultures above. The conductor on the darkened stage, the audience flocking outside the police line, the devils all packed and gone, and the utter loneliness of a failed lucifer - hell, long since locked from the inside, had slammed its iron bars once-final.

So the prince and the duchess awoke to the same phonecall the next morning. Far past the honeygold sunlight of mushrooms and honeycomb blossoming in the skull of the lion, the world was cloaked dreary and still. The phonecall went on and they all solemnly remarked the end of the era. A new devil was flourishing across the sea and the time had long past them by - the curtains shuttered and soon the theatre following. Bankruptcy courts and a dwindling inheritance, like grains of sand through the fingers - starving alone in a country you were never meant to be in. Without pity, the devils look upon their abandoned lucifer in reflection to themselves, sinking away to the dark hovels made all the more bitter in contrast to what they once knew, to that halogen artificial light they had once wrenched from the animal writhing of the stone.