We Are all Gods
We are all gods
he said,
breathing fast, then withholding a step, before saying
we create for ourselves a crap universe,
chest, casket, cave, prison cell,
reciting chapter and verse (twenty-three).
I searched my nature, and found, hidden like pearls,
all places my mouth made my own,
unearned and burning as crepe-paper men, festooned
as with sweat (after bouts), with breathlessness,
with strings of better sins, that mouth to me
hey boy, sink deeper, lest what's about you,
all the hiding places that are creeping into you,
let rip, spit you up, bring Valhalla down.
Oh, they'll moan, come back groaning to me now,
he said, with a flat, dead voice
they're dumb,
may not find, among the thousands,
this masker maudit, maudlin, unfit,
unwilling to fight or mouth off.
I searched my nature, and I came back with sure information:
ever since that morning, when I woke up
remote and unhappy, alone, aware
I'd left the human race at last,
hapless in this Götzen-Dämmerung,
a sweet prince, reborn in pools of slime
more suited to faeces, sliding like knives
slipping from the corpses of us all….
We are all dead
he said
and every one a doleful knight
or idol trapped tonight in a noir twilight.