MUTOID MAN IS A DAD NOWADAYS

 

Last Season’s Winner and The Kingdom Of Ultimate Power are two lots of seven poems forming a collective set. Whereas part one focuses around themes of fleeting glory, social isolation and memory loss / cross-pollination, part two is the account of the thoroughly doomed coming before the one whose majesty is equaled only by his grace.

 

As a child, my supreme trigger word would have to be dungeon – trawling for riches amidst unknown perils in far-removed worlds gave me a deep appreciation for the great indoors. I would have preferred watching the film, The Running Man, ad nauseam to visiting The Seven Wonders Of The World. Adulthood came, and the video game, Super Smash TV accompanied me into it, beholding once again to the television’s ethereal screen. “Big money! Big prizes! I looooove it!”, booms the host. Frizzy hair, bedazzling sports jacket, red sequins and a blonde bimbo under each arm. “Go! Go! Go! Go!”, chant the humanoid audience as the contestants enter a high-tech studio-labyrinth filled with a mind-numbing plethora of nemeses designed solely to kill them, risking everything for fame and fortune. 

 

The game shaved months off my life before I completed it. The  proverbial cherry on the cake was the allurement of the Pleasure Dome – the fabled special room at the end, where if, and only if, you had collected enough keys throughout the venture, you were granted entry. Like a supermarket sweep, the contestant could grab all the products they could in a short time frame. In the game, these prizes added to the players’ score, and the total score was what etched your name (well, three letters of it) into the annals of history (or until the machine was turned off). 

 

Thanks to the marvels of CGI (Computer-generated imagery), the producers of The Running Man took the more cost-effective approach in honouring their heroes: whilst paraded before the rabid masses as being drenched in opulence on private tropical islands, the reality was they were dead and unceremoniously left to decay in the bowels of the studio. 

 

The ugly, divergent narratives of the person on the screen and the one staring at it coalesce in Last Season’s Winner. For one, the lustre from the Pleasure Dome has faded, his conscience is haunted from bloodguilt, and he has become a liability to the powers that be; for the other, he is up late, always alone, neglecting his physical body, still hunting video game glory. And no matter how much bad food he eats, the law of diminishing returns prevails – the rooms in both his worlds get smaller and the spoils fade from memory ever quicker. If years of living vicariously through fictitious characters have taught him anything, particularly in video games, it’s to see things in algorithms. The pattern he and most people don’t see though is the most crucial one: 

 

Life with self at the centre = hollowness + peril + death

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The Kingdom Of Ultimate Power is both personal and universal allegory. The exposition of other rooms we can’t see is centrifugal to it, namely the room inside the heart and the one Jesus has gone to prepare for his followers. 

 

As for my heart, by eighteen years old, it had become a gloomy cavern and I was mind-controlled by a demon to kill myself. It’s here though, at my most stained moment in time that there was a total invasion of love all around me and my reality shattered. 

 

That night I abdicated the throne of my heart over to the one who created it, and whilst the rebirth was taking place, I literally had to open my eyes, to check the house I lived in wasn’t on my back; the weight of my sin was so tangible. And then suddenly it was gone, as if banished to a place I could not see. Truly, I was a new creation. Me and members of my family wept in joy for a week. The Kingdom Of Ultimate Power had advanced. 

 

Just as Jesus came into the world to seek and save that which was lost, the protagonist of The Kingdom... returns to his abscess of a world in order to restore what he had stolen. I tried to be a better friend to those in my life too; there was a burning compulsion to share with others, to invite them to reach out to this invisible, yet ever-present force as well. Although the measure of rejection, indifference and ridicule that followed within a few weeks was more than I had been subjected to in my lifetime prior, the love and companionship from my new saviour made it seem small and without substance. 

 

There have been dark periods too; too many to chronicle. Of all these acrid things that came so naturally to me: failing, abandoning, ceasing to love, ceasing to trust, breaking covenants, Jesus did the exact opposite. I could not escape his beautiful presence. After putting myself in the hospital, wherein there are rooms upon rooms over-brimming with pain and despondency, he brought me to this passage,

 

Let not your hearts be troubled...In my Father’s house are many rooms...I go to prepare a place for you....I will come again and take you to myself...And you know the way to where  am going. (John 14:1-4)

 

Such comfort! Such truth! Those words were alive and they made me alive. 

The only thing more inexplicable than the dungeons, labyrinths and pitfalls we build for ourselves, with our fading endeavours and desperate attempts to anchor onto some sense of permanency, is the lengths the Father has gone in order to restore his wayward children and give them rest everlasting, in the kingdom of ultimate power.