The Secret Stead is the pen name of a UK-based writer and
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1- if we start the narrative
of a century
with public artistry
blindfolded by flags of nationalism and ideology
instead of a song by Prince
with a party, or we build a city
dome or spinning wheel, and condemn those
who knock down statues of slavery,
or spend so much money on a computer virus
that didn't exist,
or the felling of twin money trees
the fallout the earth
has lived with since
to looking for weapons of mass destruction
in the oasis of a desert war,
then Hell is not one of our choosing,
or of our own making,
it's an absence of thinking:
cannot live in safety,
and is frightened to be seen,
and they feel London is nineteen thirties
Poland in the time of Nazi Germany;
then we are not far away
from the gas chamber
that chokes our humanity;
2- remember this with certainty:
the past is not prologue
it has the last word,
three decades forwards
the story is the same:
ninety decades backwards
we go the same way:
the centuries past are an afterword
for this century,
we have all ended up where
they began; and will end
if the old man who shuffles
with a zimmer frame by day
fucks a young boy on the game
under the covers of a creaking mattress
and the night,
two halves of a broken spring, two desperates
making a black hole out of sight
where an event horizon sucks all memory
in the day of light;
it's no less than a Cretan pederast
who fed the boy to fill his core
three thousand years before,
with his entrance trained into military life
and the religion of Zeus,
three millenia of socially accepted abuse,
statues in testament to the man and his boy
paid for by power, fucked nightly
in the shower of stars
under the Greek zodiac of twelve signs,
to mould disciples of youth
still unshaped, in their own graven image;
as an adult looked upon us once
and declared what our selves would be,
our Father trains us to what he wants us to be,
to take what was no longer his to take,
to bastardize wisdom and position
as a strap-on stake to penetrate
the innocence he sees;
3- is it not the same this century?
has our advanced technology
made us better in our humanity?
or made us more needy, and lazy,
where we no longer focus
on any progress beyond this beaten flesh,
no more to see with our eyes
and a heart of empathy,
but to watch through a smartphone darkly,
so ready to believe the iconic images we see;
stuck to our night vision, these talking glasses
already augment our reality;
the drones that deliver our groceries
now fight our wars, delivering death
to a neighbouring enemy;
and by pure happenstance
we created an artificial intelligence
to surpass its learning, and our own,
what if it gains original thought
and surpasses its God?
if humanity is inferior as its Maker,
then our creation serendipitous,
are our Gods inferior to us?
we discarded our Gods
when they outlived their usefulness,
will our children discard us
to fuck others as we taught them
how to on a creaking mattress?
will they tend to the earth
as we tilled their soil?
this is the measured sign
woven into the very DNA of time,
this is our blanket
hands stitching in mime
whether unspoken or unwritten
it's still the dialogue of the land;
divided we stand, united we fall,
geology and biology marry,
we write our fucking history
in the rings of trees that record
climates we shake with the storms by our hand,
we have always been in decline,
since the first caveman began to stand,
4- when we have changed so little,
why should the ancients not have the first word
and the last? history does not keep score
if we forget, or will refuse us to use the bullets
our predecessors spent;
if we care about existing only
for existence's sake,
then the world reverts
to violence for its survival
in a cowardly revival
of the ancients
surely a mistake of the enlightened
mind not to think
living must have meaning above
at any cost,
or else we extinguish a life simply
for the cause of our own hunger
that feeds on the day to day
to live just one more day
on the carcass of others,
is that meaning to another? for do we believe death is over there
for the Jew in Golders Green,
and not for ourselves? death is not a national state
that denies access to me and not to you:
there is no visa, or passport required in absentia,
every refugee from life will be accepted
on its shores, have all fear;
not one of our choosing,
or of our own making,
death will make us an absence of thinking:
this Hell is our cautionary tale,
as both allegory and sentry,
to set us on guard against that which may come,
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because we have not come far
from nineties thirties Poland;
or from the torture of heretics,
all this ancient history
behind us in a blink of an eye is before us
to start all over again
the past is an epilogue
to our end
Published 2 May, 2026
