Pale Horse Rider

Pale horse rider, dripping font of pure overflowing knowledge of life.
You know what I mean friend? Real knowledge, the kind that awakens in the flesh, like when you hear the sound of a rattlesnake in the grass. That's what he carried in his saddlebags, liquid lightning to crack your skull, enough to open thousands of minds and set them free as jackrabbits under a wide blue sky. He had been an angel once and now he roared through the wasteland gathering up the dead and making them quick.
Some might tell you it was chance that led him to each particular individual, but it was something trickier than chance. One might call those meetings synchronistic events. I'll tell you this; he was looking for them, for each of them in particular. Just as a man with a vendetta will go from town to town finding his debtors and delivering them of debt by way of steel, fire, and hot lead, so the pale horse rider went in search of the men deserving of his liquid lightening. He administered his medicine, town by town, man by man, with unrelenting resolve.
And I'll tell you another thing, as important as the last; they were also looking for him. Even if they didn't know his name or face in this world, their hearts were calling to him loud as squawking crows. That's the real way of it. In any encounter of unearthly significance, you can be sure both parties were looking for action.
In his never-ending quest to make the dead lightning quick, he met many a man whose face and name you would recognize. Men of reputation. Dead men trapped in limbo crying out for liberation. The pale horse rider hunted them, patient and steady, a spider. He found them and cracked their skulls wide, tore their ribcages open and let those screaming birds fly.
Each time this was done, the new quick went forth into the world, his apostles. Born in the fire and light of knowledge, rising from the ash of what they had once been, they returned to the wasteland as phoenixes armed with liquid lightening. Hunting heads in the western lands.
Methods vary. Not all of the quick are nomads. Some make their webs and wait in shadowy places for the dead to seek them out. Others call loudly for the dead to gather around. Some hunt one by one by one like the angel of the wasteland that found them.
He is out there still, as he has always been, riding down dusty roads, quest unending, name unuttered, face unknown. He is legend. He is many and he is none. Seeking the seeker and making the dead quick, pale horse rider, angel of the wasteland, ride on.

Searchers

You are searching for yourself in the wasteland. In the dusty range among the blood soaked buttes and natives under powdered blankets. You are searching, a searcher, searching for yourself, for the eyes that were shot out while you lay in an unmarked grave, under sand and desert breath, fine and fiery. You look and when you see you shudder. You tear away the miles and the years, distances that can’t be measured and find THE OTHER resting beneath your skull like a stranger in your bed squirming up close to your reposed flesh. You are searching for yourself and here you are, a loathsome abomination that you wish to smite out of existence with a blazing barrel. Memories out of the wide blue vistas and rolling thunder clouds that seldom visit wash down over you, sweep you away in a torrent of rage and self hatred. You found it, you found what you were looking for and now you wish to smash it, destroy what you don’t understand, what you don’t know. What you don’t know. What you don’t wish to know… what you wish to forget so you shoot its eyes out, gouge your own eyes out with speeding fragments of lead so that you can forget… so that you can dream. You dream of a wasteland teeming with life. The quick little hare scampers from her den, the coyote snatches her up and carries her away… and you pursue them. You insist on prodding the wound, opening it wide, making it bleed until you remember that you wished to forget. A long wavy scalp dangling from a pole, it demands an us to exact our revenge on a them. Bodies flowing out of canyons and caverns, rivers and tee pees. Bodies wailing from under the brush. You are searching for yourself in the wasteland. In the dusty range among the blood soaked buttes and natives under powdered blankets. The ones who are of the wasteland, the very fabric of your confusion, they flicker like fire light, one moment familiar, the next moment strange. Strangely familiar forever these OTHERs. You remember the snow, cold and wet, hiding their tracks so that you could not find them, could not find the one that you seek. You are a searcher seeking after understanding of self. You have journeyed beyond, outside the cozy world of the comfortable and familiar. Dazed, you discover that you can never go back. You have lost your way. You are condemned to being them to yourself forever more. You are searching, a searcher, searching for yourself, for the eyes that were shot out while you lay in an unmarked grave, under sand and a desert breath, fine and fiery. Memories, revenge, a cup of coffee and a rocking chair…so that you can dream, strangely familiar forever.