Silhouette Sunday
Religion never really died – it just moved on.
Technology. Lust. Money. Fame. The religions of the first-world fed on the detritus of absconded gods.
And so it came it be; Silhouette Sunday, once born of ancient Easter – a time of birth from death.
In the sterile factories filled with embryonic stem-cells, the DNA of the once-living sits waiting to multiply, to grow in predetermined sequences, to breathe the recycled oxygen of all that ever lived: once again.
One day each year, the dead can be brought back – for enough money, or favours that grant what money cannot buy.
When they come back, they’re as alive as we are now – so the brochures say.
Forget bringing back Elvis or Mandela. These are the walking-dead that fill Silhouette Sunday with their personal gratification, whatever that may be.
In the subways. They rise from the tunnels of darkness, up the stairs and into the light of life. They clutch their Prada handbags like they are the forbidden fruit of Eden. They move silently through the shoals, the city-dwellers, the religious extremists of a different kind. Like bioluminescent fish, we swarm the streets with faces mood-lit in the spectrum of the latest emoto-tech. Stay away from me, come to me, I’m enigmatic and mysterious our mood-colours say. But the Silhouettes can see us no more than an earthworm can comprehend string theory.
In the fields, the Silhouette people of bloodlust persuasion leave pink carpets of bovine entrails and bones. The snipers enjoy the practice once a year. The authorities call it containment, the snipers simply call it fun.
In the strip-clubs they drool, they rub: they never last long.
In the towns they watch the rain dancing, ping-ping-ping, in the puddles of xenon lights.
They seek discarded trash; just to touch, just to feel the scratch of polystyrene on fingertips hours old.
So much beauty. So much life.
Sometimes they just sit there and breathe. They suck the recycled air of all that ever lived into their expanding new-born-lungs. They just breathe.
The rapture of a life fully lived for one day.
Religion never really died – it just moved on.
Metropolitan Dreams 