The New Sun
“For empires crumble as I’ve been told, and in the rib-caged wreckage of gray leviathans I may glimpse some hint of the blueprint of this shared corruption. I may come to comprehend why I could never mend my own desolation. I may erase my station.”
Image by Natalya Letunova
Surrealist Prophecies #6
The sixth in a sequence of surrealist prophecies written using the divinatory technique of automatic writing (with subsequent revision). The theme of the sequence is the collapse of our global civilization due to uncontrollable climate change, leading to a mass rejection of both faith and reason and the re-enchantment of our world among the ruins of our failed creations. Some of the poems in the sequence are set before the Fall and portray the spiritual and emotional dilemma of our current crisis. Some describe the Fall itself, and the strange changes in thought and perception that will be needed if any are to survive a world in which humanity has been radically de-centered. Some describe the world to come, a world newly alive with gods and spirits yet free of all dogma or fixed belief – a world of beauty and strange magic.
The sixth prophecy was inspired by an Alley Valkyrie shirt design, and the “rib-caged wreckage” of the Colosseum. It describes the death of a mystic in the years before the Fall, and hints at the coming rebirth of both the individual and the world. The “brass sun” in the poem refers to the failed attempts of the Finnish gods to create a mechanical sun after the real sun was stolen by Louhi, the witch of the north wind. A world without a spiritual heart is a doomed world, and no technology can change that.
The New Sun
Instructions for a funeral –
Hold no tribunal.
That man was a gnostic,
If often caustic.
So make a new sun out of brass.
Bless it with burnt cash slipped from the pockets of the old Caesar
Who drools in his glass castle counting calculus,
And tell the fire I’m coming soon.
If you want to, sweep my room.
Croon if you need to, but do not keen.
Nobody asked me to shake my fist at archons,
If you know what I mean.
You know I was never one of those clashing cymbals,
Hollow of throat like a brash jackal.
I never brayed at any tomb.
And if I sang
A wordless song sometimes
Beneath the stars and moon
To unseen powers
And you ask what for –
Well, I was only waging war.
I wasn’t fond of flowers.
Gather up
Whatever broken coffee cup
You considered “ours,”
And tell them all
My time had come.
If it feels numb, don’t poke it.
Just rinse your eyes out completely,
Comb your hair out neatly,
And go home.
But as for me, I’ll be gone.
For empires crumble as I’ve been told,
And in the rib-caged wreckage of gray leviathans
I may glimpse some hint
Of the blueprint of this shared corruption.
I may come to comprehend why I could never mend
My own desolation.
I may erase my station.
My eyes may become the starry skies
That are not wise nor foolish
But only real.
My cuts may heal into healthy hillsides
Of humming bees.
My blood may flood.
My breath might bloom.
There are a million things I might become.
And in some life –
Some life I cannot imagine,
Some distant life –
I may look out beneath strange skies
And there glimpse your eyes.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Zech
Christopher Scott Thompson is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, devotee of Brighid and Macha, and a wandering exile roaming the earth.
