“12 Steps in A Life’s Journey of the Deus Ramos of His Time: The Opening Scene”

The detonation of thunder exploded in a percussive charge along the road he was traveling on, the road a winding temporary detour off the main desert highway. The concussion caused him to reconsider his roundabout way. It has been a long way from his detoxification, his metabolic thoughts reprocessed since being injured by the addictive elements of his past. He had since overcome his physiological and psychological dependencies by drawing the poisons slowly from himself, but also removed were his character and reputation, derailing his life, causing him to lose his tribal memberships and customs, the effort causing irrevocable damage and loss. It was an injurious trial, wearing away the loose fragments and debris of his prior mind, leaving behind the eroded matter of the late 20^th century, such excesses already swelling the human race with such casts of the die that result in unexpected, artificial, and improbable characters and tangled plots with no solutions to their difficulties. Though he was regarded as the foremost poet of his time, the Deus Ramos if you will, he was now lost as he paused among the clusters of white and pinkish dentzias lining the now treasonous and darkening path. He remembered the British dancers and the words of the Prime Minister before they were devalued by time and laid to waste. He was heading toward the next town, seeking to improve the quality of life wherever he went, to fulfill that particular end and need until it became so complex and intricate that he could not maintain that specific roll, or continue to serve that particular purpose, at which point he would then retreat to what he considered to be a more strategic defensible position, until the growing population in the residential and commercial sectors developed their goods and services beyond his rhythmic and harmonic influence and evolved beyond his mental and physical capacities. Many thought it would last throughout his life, until death, causing behavioral changes beyond the remedy of any piety and learning or the patronage of any English nobleman such as those favored by Elizabeth I and executed for treason for taking part in uprisings of the people of London- no Robert Devereux to his rescue. Deprived of any recovery, his title stripped and his property taken, a Mother Goddess appeared in the form of a Devi, which shielded him from the accepted standards of society. His deviations from the behaviors and attitudes around him only magnified his presence, making it difficult to deflect the plans and schemes that were designed to destroy him. While he wandered aimlessly doing as he must, he met a personified spirit of evil, the ruler of hell, an energetic, mischievous, daring, and clever persona with malevolent intent. Armed with such a low level of sophistication he would have been consumed forever by the diabolically depraved and tormenting demon, had he not been always inclined to take the position of the devil’s advocate, thereby turning the malicious evil upon its issuer, which freed him, but left him voiceless. It was a long time before he was pronounced cured, and that in successive stages. He was set apart for higher purposes- he seemed to be enthusiastically committed to, and ardently devoted to his cause, showing an almost religious zeal for and sureness of performance in his pursuit, though he was almost murdered by an angry mob for not heeding their unruly danger, and was saved only by his mental skill and grace in social customs and a sense of the order of the universe, not to mention the civil authorities that arrived just then and presented an opposing force which resolved the matter quickly. Now he is in dialog with his ideas and opinions, exposing the contradictions inherent in all events, and he proceeds forward toward the thunder, a figure as if adorned with diamonds, but feeling only like a small moth drawn toward a flame, in a tragic false flight of hope, under its influence to the ashen end. He passed a light-colored, porous rock made up of two atoms, piercing through the brittle surface, interlocked in a symmetrical skeleton, translucent, seemingly surrounded by bright, bodily tissue and suspended in its adverse environment. Onward he trudged, not heeding that his path was fraught with danger and risk, his bleeding heart pressing him on, bitterly criticizing him for his hesitations, a reprimand he did not wholly oppose, knowing that any chance of happiness in his future depended on his finding his conscience through a new poetic diction that tested his theories against the unsuspecting, in his pursuit of the relative truths that enveloped him. He trembled at the gathering storm ahead, and was now twelve steps further along in his life’s journey.