Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

They come by the droves to the desert
From another desert far away
These Texans, so anxious to climb
Holy mountains, holy tels
Tracing the footsteps of a man
Your people revile
They pay well, very well
They lap up the stories eagerly
Even a little bit of their religion
Thrown in like strong spice
Elicits rapture, hallelujiah
But at every turn from every group
The question eventually comes
What must we do to see you saved?
What do we have to do to send you
Home with a brand new religion?
If you take their money
You must take their wine, their bread

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Traitor they called him
Apostate from the faith
Cast out from the chosen
Banished from the elect
A powerful symbol for those
Who would see his nation saved
A powerful warning for those
Who would see it intact
As he preaches on the mount
Covered with bodies of his nation
Does he feel a twinge of regret
Or see only the gold-gilt dome
That sees both the he that was
And the he that is
As equally guilty

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Godly women are so very rare
The preachers on high proclaim
So when grey hairs crept in
Three men who had never met
Had godly women mailed to them
One from islands that had been America
One from a land America once warred for
One from America’s younger brother
It was equitable, they were saved
Shedding the Mass of youth for
Full immersion and comfort
Devout they were, devout they remained
But meeting on the holy land’s streets
While their men knelt and prayed
Talking in their adopted tongues
They wondered what might have been

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Divorce came early
He wasn’t a bad husband, just flighty
But his replacement provided a living
And three sons besides
The first child, a daughter, sought him
Found him fading, the picture crumbling
Edges inward, death with a smile
Devout, she sought healing in faith
One last chance to be a family
Perched in Gesthsemene
She on her knees, miracle on her lips
He, descening softy into night
Calling her by the name of the sister
He remembered from childhood
Resurrected in the garden

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They married young
He the strapping star of track and field
Already employed, assembling tractors
She the quietly pretty daughter, held close
Prepared for marriage as her only employ
She brought trunks of books with her
But no children as they grew soft, stooped
He loved her but did not understand her
Slept in while she kneeled before crosses
When the time came for renewal
There was only one option, the holiest land
Rock of ages, renewer of the faithful
He aimlessly cast stones off ancient ruins
As she bowed before Byzantine altars

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Some have called him a walkeing stereotype.
The man of God with soft Georgia twang
He embraces it gladly
For it means people he has never met
Seem to already know him
And yet his brows knit sometimes, frustrated
For it also means people he has never met
Seem to already reject him
Remembering perhaps a soft velvet twang
Wrapped about a mailed fist
Looming in their own past
When you seem like a man already known
You open yourself, a vessel, to the past

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The Drac Asiv counted himself foremost among the Dracs of the Vassalage because his ancestor had been the first to supplicant himself before the Liege. For that, he had been awarded the title of Drac—”dragon” in the Newish promulgated by the Liege. All the other Dracs, created later, looked to the Drac Asiv as the first among equals.

After the Liege died, the revolution he founded became ossified, stagnant. The Vassalage groaned under the Drac’s taxes, his conscription, his willfullness even as father passed to son and son to grandson. The last Drac, who had lost count of the generations, could not even guesstimate.

Speaking only Newish and never knowing the poverty of the Vassalage or the horror of the world it had swept aside, the last Drac Asiv was confident in his place and in his world. He could not have been more wrong.

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“And here,” said the guide, “we have Tel Ashrad, a strategic site that has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 50 times, including the present-day city you see around you.”

“Dammit,” said God. “You think they’d have gotten the idea after a thousand years. I want that spot for a cedar grove.”

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In the realms of creatives such as we all fancy ourselves to be, there is nothing sadder than a work that is left unfinished. Dickens left one with the Mystery of Edwin Drood; we never did find out who the murderer was. Robert Louis Stevenson and F. Scott Fitzgerald both left novels incomplete when they croaked, though not so incomplete as to escape publication, of course!

But I’m seeing an increasingly vile trend, especially in moving pictures, that represents a completely different form of incompleteness: the incomplete original. That is to say, a movie deliberately left with more dangling threads than a bad tailor specifically because they will be picked up in a hoped-for franchise. It’s not a new thing, of course, but a lot of the old movies that seemed to be waiting for a sequel to resolve things were really just being coy and 1970s bleak with their audiences–The Italian Job comes to mind, the original one, not the glitzy remake.

No, the earliest movie I can think of is The Golden Compass, which has no ending at all, just a setup for two sequels that poor box office never saw materialize. You could argue that the book it was based on had no ending either, I suppose, but that’s immaterial. The Harry Potter people were able to conjure one out of whole cloth when they split their bloated seventh book into two beached-whale movies.

In fact, the young adult genre is littered with would-be franchises that didn’t give the audience the benefit of an ending. City of Bones, Beautiful Creatures…all based on series of books that confidently left people haning without even a perfuntory wrapping-up because the posers-that-be were so confident they’d be the next Hunger Games (which, not incidentally, actually had an ending on the first one, if not so much the following two). I’m sure there are a dozen more in production.

Unless your movies are being made back to back, there’s really only one way to do things: the Star Wars way. That is, the way the first movie handled things, before anyone knew it would be a multitrillion-dollar juggernaut: wrap up the story but leave a few hooks for a possible sequel. In Star Wars, there is exactly one such hook: Darth Vader survives. If the movie hadn’t been a hit, that would have been that, but the movie still tells a complete story and if nothing more were to be made, that would be fine (don’t talk to me about Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, I don’t even know if that’s canon anymore).

I guess what I’m saying is…the transition from book to screen gives all sorts of opportunities. You can make things better than the original or merely rearrange them so that they fit better. If Star Wars, the greatest media property of all time, was willing to put some sort of a bow on its first installment, you should be too. Even if it means changing things a little.

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