saturnine (a belly full with stone)

saturnine (a belly full with stone)

Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,

That I essentially am not in madness,

But mad in craft.

Hamlet, Hamlet 3.4.181-188

saturnine has nothing to do with counting

unless we are counting on the inevitability

of sabotage

like angels and demons handinhand

skipping and dancing around us

in wooden shoes

such drifting and encroaching sadness

circling couples like buzzards calling

for extinction

•

there could be no asking

asking was the beginning

of the end

and she could not understand

that he could not understand

just her

(these are stories

of injustice and justice

of mortals and immortals

of time and infinity)

•

Cronus and Rhea couldn't avoid it

not even these gods damned

sacrificing children

feeding a spouse stones

Olympic deceptions ringing

in their ears like thunder

as if they were merely mortal

climbing the same prosaic pitch

bound to fail each other

like a Promethean prayer

so how can we expect to see

what the gods will not see

stones are not children

mortality is no shoddy journey

•

when he held her human ankle

over who he had wanted her to be

the sky opened above them

filled with stars and ringed planets

this was the present she didn't ask for

and he had never crafted like a ring

this was their naked act of being human

that drove the spiraling buzzards away

seeking the bloat carcasses of gods

scattered below them like stones