Last Dream Before Dawn The silence left us humbled Four walls looked on with indifference Sleep talking in circles Tired efforts fall on deaf ears Helios turn back your steeds Sleep in this day, forgive our deeds And if it by thy will to remain your pawn Please grant us one last dream before dawn My reflection fades from your eyes Failing to make do with this new life Gave up the ghost in desperate times The path is well worn but leads the way home Learning to let go of the reigns See the world consumed by flames I bid thee fair well my last dream No means to an end I have seen For this dream... You know I got to let it go

Say, Is It Really True? Say, is it really true? That the flame of hope has grown? That the spirit has changed? That the weak no longer stand alone? Say, is it really true? That the thought of war has lost its meaning? Them devils men made have died? That the power of greed is sinking? The coldest nights are followed by dawn An outburst of light that cures the blind A strong conviction has evolved in time That life demands deeds we must define Say, is it really true? That once buried virtues now arise? And that the truth itself, no longer asks for a disguise? A power that’s been neglected, denied Now blossoms and grows, calls out the best At last the change of an era has come But there won’t be much time to rest Is this the force I feel within? Heart and mind the truth? Or am I deceived again? Deceived again? Say, is it really true? That the flame of hope is lost Or am I deceived again? Deceived again!

Prophecy (Anno Domini 2009) As he our darkness, cannot we his light Imitate when we please? This desert soil Wants not her hidden luster, gems and gold: Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise Magnificence; and what can Heaven show more? John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book II Lines 269-273 After famine and war and pestilence and floods and plagues, I, a man of small consequence, yet having been born in affliction and preserved by the necromancy of unnatural science; now affirm that the words of Galileo and Copernicus, once considered blasphemy, are true. For huge Euclidean metallic winged birds roar across the sky, in great numbers and at great speed. And spidery satellites glide the heavens. And prideful man has tread the moon. And no Deity was found. The eye of man has scrubbed the starry expanse, and traveled through the eons, and has not found God. I swear my account is true and my sight is clear. I do not believe in the providence of the miraculous, or that I shall be raised incorruptible. I believe in the dross of metal. And I attest to the magic in silicon. And I swear the sands of the ocean can express with zero and one the sum total of creation. Not much has changed since Moses, burdened with stone and law, stumbled down some dusty ravine in the shadow of the Sinai, except that the chief inlet of knowledge in this age is a single illuminated tablet which can be held, or carried, or sat upon a table, and which can show any known thing or any book in any library upon the earth; which is round and populated. And that words, and drawings, and man's voice are stored in sand and carried on unseen waves which ripple through the air. Still, there is much suffering and starvation, and war and disease... and every despicable deed imaginable, and horrible deviance, and evil, and depravity, cover the firmament of the earth. What shall I say of war except that this generation has perfected it, and we can slay the multitudes faster than Christ could feed them. For man has learned the alchemy that slew Sodom and Gomorrah. And the great Himalayan glaciers have begun to melt. And the Apocalypse approaches. And the name of the final horseman is Pandora. And when the moon rises over Rome and washes the Vatican in its blue sea, and spreads its slippery blue feet in the Fountain of Neptune, the crater Copernicus stares down like some strange cyclopean eye at La Dolce Vita, blinks once, and is forgotten in the great, drifting, slumbering millennia. I know, I am, at once, ephemeral and eternal... ...and central, ...and unseen. For I have seen exact representations of the past, and the past itself. And the nature of time has changed; as if, somehow, time could foretell. But the nature of eternity remains the same, for man is still mortal. I, a common, even trivial man have seen the world from my room, and my city, which is infinitely larger, in scale, and in imagination than Rome in the time of Christ, but is smaller than Rome is now. For Earth's moon spins on its own axis, and circles the Earth. And the Earth, in turn, circles the Sun. And the Sun itself circles the Galactic Core. And the stars are not gods after all. And Democritus was proven correct. And the universe is infinitely large and infinitely small. And God has not been found at either end of this polarity. And yet, those claiming to know God, are, by no means, a rarity. The rulers of my time are cruel and clever as they have been throughout the ages. For the nature of man has not changed. And man knows: every deprivation every suffering every insult every degradation every humiliation and is still used as a beast and is still spat upon and used as a slave and treated unjustly and tortured, and killed. And all of this is done because the eye of God has not been seen in the infinite heavens since the Fall. For space curves and Gravity befalls us all. We have brought down Leviathan and the tower the Babylonians built, was nothing compared to our spired cities. The streets of Jerusalem and Gaza run with blood, and the Lion of Judah flashes its gold fangs, and stretches itself out under the hot sun. And money is loaned at higher interest to the poor than it is to the rich. And the poor are among us. And our firstborn sons are given to war. And we curse our rulers. And virgins are taken by force, and for no value, and they are never betrothed. And endless are the number who perished because they were someone the Deity loathed. Our armies are legion and the power of my nation is beyond the imagination of the ancient Pharaoh. And the motto on our currency proclaims in God we trust. And yet, no one has seen God. And Noah has found the Galapagos. And while the Stones performed Sympathy for the Devil for 300,000 living souls Hells Angels prevented murder and mayhem by sacrificing one from among them. And in Iran, falsely accused adulteresses stand proxy when Abraham Stones the Devil repeatedly. And the age of the Prophets has passed in the shadow of Reason. So now, an epoch passes in a single season. And the heavens, Lord, are cold and full of stars that blink in the frigid expanse of night like the cold, listless eyes of psychopaths. And my soul, which is filled with knowledge, and the learning of men from throughout the ages, knows nothing of your divine nature, or of angels, and rages with hunger and longing and death. And I long to hear your soul, to hear you take a breath. I want to hear the language of angels and the dreams of Jupiter and Neptune, and the Pleiades; to expand noiselessly like thin oil, or slippery molecules across the dreamy, frozen ocean of space--to be as thin as nothing, as negligible and pervasive as zero, as insubstantial as air. I long to be impossible or an improbable sequence of events in the absurd theater of being. And yet, here I am, two dark bellows inhaling all of creation and exhaling it a little at a time into thin air--and void --and space. I sit with my sins clothed in the shroud of mortality, condemned from birth and exiled here on an infinitesimal speck of rock in a sea of light in the Orion arm of a spiral galaxy. And I Am... Alone. Gerald Long 12/23/04

Bonfire of Myth: Prologue II. Tableau Great Warrior, can you see through the haze of misconception? And even from the depths of thine own grand perdition? Amplified by greed, wrath, and false trials of redemption Great warrior blind ambition is magnified by hell’s eternal touch Find your way Find your way through Inside the halls of The Great Assembly Motivated by your carnal treasures You must drink from the cup of The Gods You must reach out to seek their trust Fall victim to their boundless sin Unravel hidden layers of unbridled, everlasting lust. Take upon thyself The sins of our fathers! Here within The Tableau, seek thy riches See your fleeting future Here within The Tableau, there is shelter Here within The Tableau, there’s a safe place Rest your soul my weary son! Tiresias, I beseech you, give unto me the greatest light Bequeath unto me all thy knowledge and might! Standing on the edge and overlooking this bleak eternity I gazed longingly upon humanity and knew of their plight Recounting the tale within The Last Great Council We pondered the burning question of The Blessing and The Curse Do we have the right to interfere? Misguided passion will surely destroy all Oh where are thou Great Warrior called on high? Will you take upon thyself this burden by choice or be buried and forgotten in time? Carry on wayward solider fear not the task ahead We will provide you a way The Tableau is close in hand Bear witness unto this alliance which has been forged!