The fulcrum.

Sooner or later, with any dictator,
It comes down to a hole in the ground.

When you’re crouching there, praying
Can you hear the pack baying
Or your breath and the worms all around?

You  may reflect on your deeds
And the needs of your people
And how one served the other
So neatly, so cheaply.

When you hear the hatch squeaking
Are you praying and weeping
Or even now keeping
The hope that you will not be found?

Does your past flash before you?
Does it do the dance for you?
Do you watch it parade from the stand?

As you fumble for pills
Are you feeling quite ill
Or reliving the facade that was so grand?

You might as well think of the parties and dances
The way they all clapped your gyrations and prancings
The thunderous applause, which is all yours, of course,
As you wave from a platform, a tank, or a horse.

You should relive the pop stars who sang on their knees,
The nubile young girls so eager to please,
Government heads, so worried, appeasing.
Your armies, your warplanes, your ordnance, your fiefdom,
Your palaces, your artworks, your treasures, your reason
Can you pin down which point they began disappearing?
Somehow, right now, they don’t seem to be around.

The future impinges-
They will string you and swing you
And by the neck wring you
Till vision becomes very vague
And you can’t even curse-
Is this better or worse
Do you think, than a trip to the Hague?

At this point you may feel
That it’s not really real and cannot be occurring to you
But your mind flickers back
Have you covered the tracks?
Did you burn all the papers, cover all the traces
Machine gun the mouths, torture each last rememberer
Burn all the skulls and scatter the embers
Dismember the witnesses, shred all the logs
Take the clerks who did the shredding and feed them to the dogs?
Have you torched every, scorched every, reforged every
Deployed every, destroyed every, uncreated every last
Little fragmentary atom
Of any slight thing left, that might be true?
Pointing at you?

In that case, if you will
You may now pop the pill.
You can exit the mission
Seeking oblivion
You got your revenge
On the world at the end.
You can stick it in and swallow
And cancel tomorrow.
Just stick it in your head
And swallow
And be dead.

At this exact point of time the idea that the end may have been reached, is erroneous.  The point of personal history that has been achieved, is, in fact, the fulcrum.  The fulcrum is the place at which everything that has happened so far, with the subject as its direct or indirect causality, will swing around and, under the force of its own momentum, start to slow play in reverse.  In this universe of reversed time and occurrences, the subject will himself become the recipient of each one of his own deeds.

The startling fact is that the weight of every religion and belief system in the world has created an endless event horizon of the mind into which, inescapably, we tip at the point at which we exit the breathing phase.

There is a phrase – hell is other people.

Here is another phrase – eternity is reliving every living thing you ever met

but this time in their skin, looking through their eyes, reaching out with their thoughts, cringing with their emotions, experiencing their pain, feeling every one of their cuts, suffering every screaming point of their terror, sinking endlessly over the event horizon of their final despair.