Author: Eden Bloom

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A Clarificational

Manifesto read roughly, falling into sleep, waking to more blood. As usual, this isn’t a confessional, it’s a clarificational, clarity to combat manifestos.

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing here, I mean, I don’t and I do. 

I’m not getting older I’m getting thinner,
stretched out on the horizon before and behind.

There is intent and there are side effects, they blur together as they move into the distance.

Spiraling out in a paradigm shift, I’ve destroyed the servitors made to bring me out and protect me. 

I do not have the resources to get out and, as discipline demands I’ve burned all the bridges behind me. 

I am a rock, an island landlocked and no manner of song, spell or poem will unbind.

I’m not getting older I’m getting thinner, stretched out on the horizon before and behind.  

I now have passengers in my care, marked like me 23, that I’ve landed here at the end, toward what end?

I can’t find the combination of gestures, the code or the gods-damned door to get us out of the way.

I have erected the corners in line with the stars that I still know how to find. I light the fires on what I think are the right nights, and I wait, and they grow. 

Then there is that matter of time, it’s not speeding up, it’s lengthening. 

I’m not getting older I’m getting thinner, stretched out on the horizon before and behind. 

Then there is the awareness, while I am an island to the human race, I expand in other realms beyond my kind, my eyes. 

The wild dogs, the hawks, rats and the bacteria puddled in the street, Oh! the land and Oh! the dead, they talk to me.

This piece is included in Eden Bloom  Eschaton Life

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Blood Money

Don’t worry old fam, I’m not coming to the funeral. I’m not looking for a payday and won’t be coming round to collect a dime.

I’ve spent my life trying to do it without your blood money, struggling so I wouldn’t be in further debt to the man who brought me into this world and tried to take me out.

This will be the 3rd inheritance paycheck I’ve not cashed or avoided. I’m sure they’ll start a scholarship in my name, I mean his name, or something like that instead.

© EschatonLife

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Every morning I wake before dawn

Every morning I wake before dawn to brush away the demons and angels that have accumulated through the night, the ones that follow in my wake, my albatross, my mutated cross. 

Broken oaths, bad blood, blood bonds and divine protections, wanted and unwanted, some intentional, some still unseen, but all felt daily, and not only by me. 

So in darkness or twilight, without malice, but maybe with a slight post-penance regret, I sweep out the cobwebs and push them back at bey and clear the way for the coming day. 

Even so and as I do, they’ll regroup and re-approach while waging their battle over my soul and my deeds, one side bound to protect, another sworn on blood to destroy. 

And they do, and though I sway with the battle, these days I’m able to maintain and wake early in the morning, clear out the dead and those hiding.

Say the words, draw the signs, make the gestures the ghosts and the land taught me and clear the way for another day in this contested space, this place where the river turns.

© EschatonLife

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Sitting this one out

Very thoughtful morning. Lots of impressions of my parents. Our parents are often the gatekeepers of our ancestors and filter the ancestor’s manifestation.

The way in which people, particularly but not exclusively white people, internalize and interpret equity and equality is making me itchy this week.

I’ve been through numerous anti racism trainings of rather varied quality for the last 10 years. It’s been a few years since the last one so I’m sure Mama Lila will call and I’ll find myself in another soon. For me it’s an expected aspect of living in a majority-Black city and working for Black women lead organizations.

I not only need to have an awareness of black history, but also must consider and have a deeper understanding of my history and how I’m placed in the present moment. While I have arrived here under duress, my approach has not lacked strategy or intention.

Let’s start with a few definitions. Equality and equity share the same root, but the blurring of subtleties between them seems to trip well intentioned people up and replicate inequities rather than resolve them.

Equality is what we could have on a level playing field, one without the towers and quarries of oppression. Equity is about everyone getting what is needed to create equality or to level the playing field.

One of the important subtitles lost is here is that, in order to level the field people living in the hills, those who have access to resources and are all set, are not entitled to further benefits or an equal stake.

It is in fact possible that in order to archive any semblance of equity, individuals and groups with amassed power may have to sit out for a few turns at the table or possibly even make sacrifices to the tune of redistribution.

© EschatonLife

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Hungry Ghosts


I’m the last caretaker of a few hungry ghosts; they may be ancestral, or I somehow, at some point, drew their attention as a host.

A confederate solider, a rapist, an unrighteous thief. There have been others, though their time in my care more brief.

My goal is to not pass them on, the mission, to take them home with me.
Out past the campfires, at the edge of the infinite, returning to the endless We.

© EschatonLife