Clock
A slipped-close lock, a stillicide at night,
A steady click, like dropping from a height.
By one by one a cue for emptiness,
An ordered power makes me orderless.
The analog outside evokes a lock.
But am I in a closet or a clock?
I am a second-hand, as I advance
And lock myself again with every stance.
On cue I lose the order of my mind.
With every second's cue those orbs unbind
To race across in chaos and rebound
And glide away again with every sound.
146 BCE
I.
Dead Corinth and Carthage and Carthage and Corinth
the obverse and reverse and alternate sides of
a death-coin of triumph and slaughter and chaos
and glory and pillage and delendam esse
and what kind of causa honoris could Cato
with his goddamned figs and his spite-jealous-spite bring
when hauled before great Rhadamanthus and Minos
and told, "Rikku Hakumei far in the future
has asked an account for your war-crimes and slaughter
and says you're the cause and that Rome didn't want to.
Is it as she says, that you hated the wealthy
and poor with the same schizophrenic hell-fury
alike, that if you never lived they would love Rome
and nomads from steppes would melt into freedom
and maybe they'd be speaking Latin in Phoenix,
the city that's named after Tyrian red-dye,
the product that launched the whole Punic adventure,
the bird with a Greek name, but you wouldn't read Greek
by your pathological fear of a guest-friend --
to wit, xenophobia, never productive
against your best leaders and ancient examples,
against Alexander and Persian Darius,
and, fuck, let's eat Corinth, the Greeks are all pussies --
the dark complementary angle to Carthage
the same psychological error you started,
so you stand accounted for all of the chaos,
for Sulla and Crassus and Pompey and Caesar
for Nero, Caligula, Commodus, slaughter
with laughter, insanity, in Christianity --
she'll grant the peace to Tiberius Gracchus,
a man your heirs killed, but the war and perversion
the Crusades, the New World, the Hammer of Witches,
the Wars of Religion and probably Hitler,
since killing the Jews is shit you guys invented,
from Simon bar Kochba to medieval pogroms,
The Jews and their Lies to The Elders of Zion,
it's all just a censor's intolerant madness
that thanks to you came to be seen as a virtue
by people who started by making alliance
when Greeks and Etruscans around you, divided
from city to city, could not create nations
much less join to fight you, and then you expanded
the same way, through bequests and treaties and such stuff,
and though, even then, there were war hawks and crazies,
the Romans remembered the ones who were kindly,
until your ass showed up and blew down the card-house?"
II.
Would you start soft and say, "It's just human nature,
and Romans weren't cruel compared to the ancients
in Mesopotamia, stomping the war-chiefs
from some other city-state into submission
and drawing mean art we just copied -- in Egypt
the pharaohs were drawn out of scale, whether hunting
or fishing or eating or stomping more baddies,
or Hittites, or even your girly Athenai,
the "greatest democracy" I should have looked at
for my inspiration, is what all the bum-boys
and weak intellectuals crowding the Senate
would tell me: well, Rikku, those "heroes" were cruel.
At first chance they got -- when, defeating the xenoi
or helping to beat them, they set up a league for,
they said, common defense from Persian aggression
but siphoned off funds for the Parthenon first, and
when some of their "allies" said, "Not sure I like what
you've done with our money, and I don't see Persians,"
Athenai responded, "You can pay, or fight us!"
Which led to the stupidest war in Greek annals.
So where was the kleos or time in that, wench?
(Whenever a woman tries to speak a man's thoughts,
a twisted reflection of truth that a man thinks,
they come out distorted, just like Clytemnestra.
I may not have read Greek until I was eighty,
but here in Tartarus I've had time aplenty.)
And, frankly, I think that my hatred was misplaced
in life, for the Greeks were as proper as we were
in gender relations, in glory for battle,
if not quite in disdaining luxuries always,
but then, when I tried to ban pleasure, Rome was
resistant and shouted me down. If there had been
more Catos in Greece, they would not have razed Corinth
I'd like to hear Minos reply, then -- if he can!"
To which the great king who is judge over Hades
would rumble and measure out his reply slowly:
"I call on Minerva, the goddess of wisdom,
who has her domain over all truth and justice,
who was the first judge in the case of Orestes,
and who is a woman, to punish your errors.
It's true, as you say: other people were cruel
before Rome -- and after, without Roman causes,
but can that expunge such a record of madness?
The past guilt of others does not bear on this case.
The tales of Minoans are lost to the world now,
as we were not prideful and wrote what we needed
and no more, and fought when we needed
and no more, but you have seen work from our artists,
that your children's children would use for mosaics,
and we didn't like war, although we would fight it,
and didn't depict it, preferring the ocean,
the ultimate source of our life, and religion,
our comfort and solace and pride, but no terror.
But Dorian Greeks came and slowly destroyed us,
a careful commercial web slashed by a sword-clan.
They called on their gods to send earthquakes and fire,
and now they are our gods, because they were better
in battle -- on this I shan't speak any further.
But my land was innocent of your peccati,
as were many others, so don't bring that shit here.
You know you are guilty because, here in Tartarus,
as all above know, since reported by Vergil,
the father who's dead can see all of his children,
and what they've engaged in and how they are faring.
Your children are meanness and toil and oppression,
and hatred, and narrowness, Fred Phelps, Ann Coulter,
and the Cato Institute. These are your harvest,
as is death in Bactria and in Hibernia.
So I sentence you--" he conferred with Aiakos.
"To go back to Earth to help cure global warming.
It's pretty much where we send everyone useful.
You're brilliant, if crazy. Help, and we'll forgive you.
Off duty, you'll be Rikku's hawt Roman girl-thrall.
We had to pay somehow for such a long poem!"
I Am Having Sex With Edna St. Vincent Millay
A verdant meadow stretches to the sea,
and dappled bits of sun catch in my hair.
This is Elysium, at least to me --
what other guests may see I hardly care.
I close my eyes to lick her florid heart
and drink the new-old vintage of my love,
and, ending, face her quivered form and start
to ask my poet, beaming while above,
a question I had asked on glitter-days,
on many nights, the ice-breeze drifting in,
a finger to my lips, and with a phrase
she'd silence me, but not today: I win.
She quotes: "I would I were alive again /
To kiss the finger of the rain," and leaves.