Poisoned Wine

Look at you Shiva, drinking it down to the sediment.

You’re a perfect child. Livia’s perfect child.


You’re Livia’s truest servant. You’re the one who was most loyal. Who most believes. It’s sweet, in a way. Dutifully chugging your wine. Pretending to savour it. A connoisseur of disgust. Livia would approve.


You have an instinct for servitude, Shiva. It suits you in some way. Putting the M in S&M.


You were her favourite. So full of world-disgust. Do you really hate the world quite that much? Every bit of the world?

What’s so wrong with you, Shiva? What vital thing went wrong in your childhood? How did you reach boss level of world disgust? Whose fault is it?


You’re nothing if not dogged, Shiva. Seeing things through the end, endlessly. The most faithful Gnostic.


You’re persistent. You have discipline. The way you’re forcing down her wine. Stubbornly determined that it’ll give you some … enlightenment. That you’re going to learn something.

And you think we’re not?


You haven’t learnt the vital lesson. That there’s nothing to learn. That Livia was a liar, just like everyone else. That she was a poisoner. And this wine is just poison.


Jesus turned water into wine. Livia turned wine into vinegar. Hardly a  miracle.


The wine went off, long ago. Just like Livia went off, long ago. All Livia was a going off.


There are only degrees of poison. And Degrees of being poisoned. There are only varieties of lie. The lies we tell ourselves. The lies others tell us.

We wouldn’t know the truth. We wouldn’t be able to tell truth from lies.

 Yes, we would.

The truth would be entirely wasted on us, we who live by lies. Who have been fed nothing but lies.


Just pour it into the earth, where it belongs. Pour the poison into the poisoned earth.