THE SCRIBE

By chance I partook of life’s greatest lie,

That life was capricious.

That life was all that the mind could behold,

And all that the hands could create.

I spoke to my mother of it,

She told me to pray that I don’t get eaten by the world,

That moment was sold to peace,

And my eyes beheld the lie.

I e’er thought that my life was but a particle of dust,

Everyday I waited for something to happen,

I waited for a sign as I waited for chaos,

But I am ever vexed.

So one day I said to the Lord,

I prayed him show me the light.

I couldn’t believe in the thing that happened next,

For the thousandth time, I write.

EL CULTO QUE AME`

 

I always wondered at a man who had utter contempt of his mortality,

Until I met him that preached by the river.

He was ever in the company of his little goblins,

Kind creatures and slaves to his whim.

When I met him, he looked at me as if I was a burst of air,

Nothing more than a passing wind.

His eyes scraped at my skin,

Made me feel like unrefined Kapok straight from the rainforest.

He welcomed me into his arms,

I ran to him seeking meaning and a cause to be remembered by.

Long did I serve him, for a long time I fell in love with him;

He was everything a girl could want and everything a man could ever be.

I persisted in my obsession and took him like a drug every other time I felt sick.

I have seen on the telly many like me, mad, obsessed, in love and unaware,

I loathed them.

Soon I forgot about them,

Soon I felt no pity for them for they were the enemy.

With their foreign gods and foreign cultures and foreign filth.

The preacher assured me that they were all very necessary

He told me that I should not think of ways of getting rid of them.

Singularity is not natural, complacency is degeneration.

Focus on not being like them, focus on hating them, he urged.

I fought their spirit and out of my spirit became the spirit of hate.

Not to kill the ideal but to kill the poor souls attached to it.

To make them afraid.

To make them suffer and whimper at my sight with dread.

To make them die and wish for death more than the starved wish for food.

One day he had a meeting to attend that he said would change everything.

He left me in charge of the river and the goblins.

‘What is this meeting?’ I asked.

‘A conclave.’

‘Are they making you Pope?’

‘Sweet Child, no…not that kind of conclave, but do stay here. Things will be much different afterwards.’

I took care of the goblins and the lukewarm worshippers of the Preacher as they came in trickles.

Soon, they started coming in floods that I had to stand on a rock to address them.

‘Mend your ways,’ I pleaded with them

‘Can’t you see that you have been misled.’

Some listened and came back week after week. I parried on, spewing hate

At times I was overcome with emotion and,

Out of my little mouth came outbursts of affection for the damned souls not there with us.

At night I would roll back in my cave and wait for the Preacher.

I would pray to him for a miracle,

That he would be there in the morning when I woke up.

He was never there, ever, but I did not feel the slightest loss of faith in him.

I waited,

I grew up.

I wrote books and,

I made love to a few people.

I was getting used to be Lord and Master of my surrounding.

I was stepping into the shoes I once worshipped and kissed,

When one cloudy morning during the rainy season,

When the river banks had burst and,

The Goblins and I were sheltering in a cave together with a few of my followers,

The Preacher, fatter than before came back.

‘It has been too long.’ I cried when I ran to embrace him.

GOBLIN NAMED GOBE:

The Preacher stood there motionless as our Mother embraced him.

He looked around coldly that you could feel the warmth run out of your body.

He sighed loudly and wrapped his arms around Mother.

Mother feeling relieved, held him even tighter and we all sighed loudly.

The Preacher in return squeezed even harder,

But nothing could prepare us for the symphony of bones cracking and the escape of the soul.

PORTENTUM DESERTO

We were once tall and proud,

We were once giants and kings,

We once lived in castles and rode on slaves,

We once ate where we had not sown,

We once drunk from the wells we did not drink.

Then the great famine came and along with it the desert locusts,

Our slaves died,

Our castles crumbled.

We survived but we became shorter,

Our noses hurt from the heat and we all shrank.

I look at my father now, once a gigantic king,

Reduced to a pile of ash for want.

We want, yet we were once kings.

We die, yet we ruled.

We barely survived our slaves,

We are now slaves to the dust daemon.

WHEN ANTONY CROSSED THE RUBICON

Hurt that my heart does, the knowledge that I have  killed you,

Cry that my eyes do for the blood I know I poured.

Oh Captain my captain, see what I have done you!

 

Better that you would have been blind,

Indeed you were blind.

Did they not beg you to see?

 

I am but a high wretched lady,

With a heart of stone, with a dead lover who is ever too blind to see,

And all fingers are pointed at me.

 

 

Forgive me sweet Anthony.

And while you are away, remember this charred heart that loves you,

Do not suffer  very much, in eternity, soon I will join you.

 

 

 

THE THREE WISE MEN IN OUR CITY

On a bright mid morning upon the river that watereth our city,

I came upon the foreman, the soldier and the clergy.

Spectacle!

One adorned in metals, the other in holy light and the other one freshly from a hole.

They spoke animatedly, and sometimes gently.

They spoke of all manner of things,

The war, the marriage of lady Sarah, and even Constella’s kinks.

They stood there to be saved from duty,

They are the academy you see.

They know all that vexeth our city,

From the broken dredge on the river to the embassy in Paris and the dead birds at the cemetery.

They know all the solutions too,

They know a bit of calculus, geography, history and management too.

The great men of our beloved city!

What would we ever do without the soldier, the workman and the man from the clergy?

 

A DAUGHTER OF THE GODS

The young goddess painfully ran away from Olympus only to be brought back by the chastising whip of her father’s thunderbolt.

It made no difference to hurl away her satchel or to howl at the accursed skies as if they were the source of her misery.

Such a dainty young goddess such as herself, a recluse among the gods hidden on Olympus.

 

Her lover waited for her for too long, all the while,

He kept his gaze fixated on Olympus.

Olympus the heart of the gods, Olympus the home of the gods,

Olympus where his heart beat, Olympus that snared his cherry blossom.

 

for too long did he keep at the wait.

Sadly for him and for Eros,

mortal as he is, immortal as the other is.

He shriveled under the scorching sun and was battered by the bitter rains.

Son of man, son of woman, how patiently he waited for the young goddess,

How patiently he died. Pity not even the trees sung his odes.

 

Not the birds whistled his tunes,

He lay there, a pile of bones,

A lost cause, a lost love. yet on Olympus,

They fed his cherry blossom with cherries,

And the blossoming flowers sang as she walked around the halls of Olympus.

THE WORLD AFIRE

Look at you sitting there…
Like some Stuart king on your wooden  bench with velvet cushions, Staring down at us as if we come fished out of the sewers.
Tell us my lord which of our parts would you love to cut out first,
Which of us brings you the highest discomfort?
If for one sin, just the one that burdens our shoulders you cringe and rub your fat nose, what would you of those that burden our souls?
See you holier-than-thou prick, you self entitled refined boar, listen and give heed,
I came here crawling from my mother in earnest shock and a fine swat upon my ass my first pain.
If I knew what I know now, I would have crawled back in the cozy moist of my former abode.
Better kill her and I than suffer the numb in my soul.
So you say you will refine us, and by the fire renew us.
Do your worst!
Oh, there! You cringe your nose again!
It’s a brilliant world for us, and a terror for you – you have to endure us. But do my lord, o’er these royal fires hold us on stakes.
Turn us as your fat cooks do pigs, and do not forget the the apples put in our mouths.
You are e’er so lovely my lord,
My world is beautiful for your brilliance that my sight must suffer.
Go on then, the stakes are here.

An Easter Ode

The serpent came out of the abyss
For a little while to keep track of his infirmities on the most unholy of lands. Oh Providence!
That we have to suffer the glare of his hatred,
That we like children abandoned have to cower from his presence.

But the serpent still is.
Save us dear Heaven.
Our time is finite and,
we are afraid of the hydra.
Save us from treachery.
And from this gloomiest of terrors, escape us.

OUR UNDERGROUND SUN

we searched for the ideal far and long,

Finally, after long ceaseless searching,

in the abode of our very own blind young;

there it was inviting us to mammon in a new sweet sly tongue,

we found solace in it and on it we clang.

Even when the mother died and the father went away drinking,

we found solace in the underground sun,

and we hang on to that imitation here beneath the earth,

because when you find modernity in imitation,

why bother to climb above ground?

NEVER AGAIN

I rose with the birds,
I slept with the animals,
The days were bright,
And the nights pitch dark.
I wrestled with the elephants,
I danced with gazelles,
I counseled with the owls,
I played with the chimpanzees,
But I never felt so cold.
I never missed the sun so.
How I wish to fly with the butterflies again,
I lie facing the rising sun,
Though I shall never feel it on my bare skin.