Wednesday, July 13, 2011

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

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