Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

Tartarus

This place is Tartarus, where the sands shift constantly, engulfing that which you desire and offering up a strange emptiness to accentuate the loss of equilibrium. Precisely when you have at last found your footing and identified a new destination on the horizon, that is when it shifts again and your destination becomes unobtainable, the awkward present is all that you can aspire to. There is a great deadly desert in the north of Africa. This place suffers not only under the cruelty of the sun, but under the black and bleeding poison of hearts turned wicked by factors too numerous to tie into a clear knot.
Who gave these dark hearts the Kalashnikov rifles they use to brutalize villagers, old men, woman, and innocent babes? Certainly the desert did not offer them up, but to the desert the brutal feed their offerings. It is into the parched cracks of earth that the blood flows. It is into the dark throats of wells which reach deep to the earth’s gut that children are tossed while their mothers burn alive, lit up like orange hued incandescent Christmas lights bleating out a horrific music. Seeds are spilled to that same ground, when the women first run from the field without hope of escape from the rape and mutilation a horde of glowering youths have earmarked for them. They rend and waste without rhyme or reason, these sons of Abel, herders turned soldiers, the blood of ancient Kush seeping into the unquenchable soil, while nearby in the quietest desolation of abandonment, the tombs of forgotten kings stare questioningly at Jebel Barkal.
What began as a movement to turn the bottom to the top has disintegrated into chaos.
Once the great Empire of Egypt rested upon the brow of the Nubian Empire. Warriors were those men of this same desert who centuries ago boarded ships and traveled from the bottom of the Nile to the top. Before Thebes they bathed themselves in the life bestowing waters and dressed in fresh linens and proceeded to the temple at Karnak to make their offerings. Only after this had been done to the satisfaction of the lord Amun did they loose their arrows into the warlords of a splintered Egypt, those jackals that had been eating the empire from the inside with wanton abandon.
It was a Nubian king that restored pharaonic rule to a once fractured Egypt. This he did with the might of ebony skinned warriors, and then returned to Nubia ruling as Lord of The Two Lands from the tail of his new Empire, down in his beloved Kush.
Where is King Piye now? Sleeping, entombed under a Pyramid in the Nubian desert watching with lifeless eyes the ages of earth fly by in the shapes of storm clouds.
Most will laugh if you tell them that there are Pyramids in the Sudan, and that Egyptian Pharaohs rest in them. To speak of the Sudan now is to speak of the first genocide of the new century, of blood thirsty packs of Salawa hunting for the ones who sow the seeds, frightful gnarled islamic amulets dangling from their sweaty necks. The same rulers of the Sudan which armed these dogs with the bite of lead administer to the building of a dam which will swallow much of the buried kingdom of the black pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th dynasty. Constantly the sands shift, swallowing first one nation, then another.
Which history is revealed is left to the whim of Eris. Who now, and for what, shall they strive? All of the world along with its inhabitants is but a snow globe turned for the amusement of a boredom stricken Mistress of Averse.
If you can, find your footing in some place other than Tartarus.