Widowed Scribe

The Widowed Scribe

Where are the wrinkled

forebears, the fabled pallbearers

playing Atlas with table-scrap castles,

those false rascals

of whom you coo and spew

paltry praise? You speak

in arcane phrase, your prior purpose pawned away.

Our lazy ramparts will not dry. It has been

days; the walls fashioned of gum and imitation

clay sag and shudder in the rain. You abstain

from raids to forge a future from the fallout,

but your recycled paste of ash and glass laughs

at its past, this last homage to eunuch ancestry

nothing but a failed retreat.

Weave me a revolution, son,

lay civilization at our feet.

We’ll flabbergast history

and filibuster empires

(hands tied behind our backs);

although you have tired of the torment

of triumph, our ascendant dynamics

will not relent – your strategies

slip across my pillow, and night-ready,

I empty pauper’s pockets & prince’s petticoats,

I’ll burn bridges and banknotes.

I leave my name engraved

on the throat of paler gods,

pausing to admire the slopes

of vowel and consonant,

the intrinsic arithmetics

of muscle and mercy.

I could drizzle diamond and jade

on the cloud-caught remains

of Father Time

(a celestial array of age spots

and varicose veins). If you will not

stay for me, then remember your able hands, marred

by history; reclaim those moonside coups you’d promised me -

all in vain.

For this, you taste the

shame of man’s fairy-tale fall.