There Are No Heroes Without the Herd

Each year I met September with its calico seals of Samhain slain in a fair death and bled by symptoms of naked hours and loneliness. I shivered with a strange dread, not of predator or prey but the threat of being siphoned too deeply, into a predictable, mass identity. I found myself swathed in an impatient void where sepia changelings twisted against wind in contempt of order and the chronological sequences of life and death and I listened to the rebellious gossip of familiar moon-light Chimeras edged with infant shadows. I was enchanted by the chaplains of the night and the deacons of depression that taught me a kinship with black sheep and the dead. Perhaps I should have obeyed the wisdom of the herd, and worshiped the pathogenic scriptures of text-book institutions... focused my eyes ahead, my mind on predetermined points my thoughts on the packaged values of dead heros. The world would have loved me if I had fed into its perception of human perfection instead of showing it its potential for failure... there are no heroes without the herd. I could have left the insanity of my adolescence behind instead of clinging to ashes and an ember of left-over youth tucked into a heavy envelope and sealed with the promise of an inferno.