Monologue of the Alien
By Joel Ephraims
Published 1 January 2021
“It was apparent from the very start that all was not even or correctly distributed in the way it fell down. Fallen seemed the most appropriate term to those present due to the elasticity and directness of wildness above them and the points of light which swirled to a precise order telling of harmonies that must have been performed there. Here as in everything I only see the patches under the quilt that their institutions, books and game language has sewn. It is a parachute and a sky which aids in the constant falling, the process of speeding up while always slowing down. They were still in their infancy though well progressed from the era of their womb. Diamonds and coal were two wires stuck into their frontal lobe. Diamond the weeping buildings beyond the mock aviaries of the poor where its sheen passed in and out of tears the rich were crying, the automatic tears of happiness like locusts painting a bike before collectively hopping on. Money was ordered in grids across the decorous fields in front of the buildings and the castle walls were rolled up into a ball which was allowed to alternate between the children playing, a constant presence at their smaller table where they ate their meals away from but parallel to the adults. The coal was dispersed over the adult’s table and they were at that crucial era of infant civilization where they had to realize what to do while already knowing. They still hadn’t figured out the best way to take their meal together and while the children passed the small ball of highly compressed castle walls around like a grey volleyball, they were set on the diverse items of consumption and on the hard but necessary edges of the chairs and tablecloths, elastic murals. In the light the ball gave at night the adults saw the shadow casters as counterparts of the children and treated their voices as so many extravagant bones. I watch from the corner of a bush, from the warped spaces from which we have always watched them, watching them build their energy machines and test their nuclear devices. With all the pale pens jammed into their cortex I despair.”