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Your Utopia—unrealized
Your inadequacy—defines you
Your purpose—choked self-denial
Your furor—flesh-searing ruin
A madness of the mind
borne of sudden clarity, acute discernment:
time and time again
the world was not yours to live in.

You’re a limping creature;
and they extol the god who wounded you.
His outstretched hand, welcome, feeling
backhands the hollow of your cheeks
into the dust, beneath his boots, his standing.
‘He must enjoy this’, you think
the depredation of your character
smile by smile, you crumple and crumble.
He is glowing, the sun, the aurous fire
and you, entrenched
in shadows, in ice—
the days sink their feral canines into your throat
for every scream, a silence endures.

Bromides, the sunshine sings of bromides
ambrosial submission, foolish childhood
“the good old days”, he still speaks of
But to whom were those days termed ‘good’?
His happiness had been punished for his arrogance
And yours denied the minute he discovered himself.

Child, you are but a man alone
Distempered, disparaged, dismissed
Fatalism?—Perhaps, and perhaps not.
Your only conviction, a principle brought upon you
that you no longer had an existence
without striving solely to tarnish his.

That aside, you were trifling.
Triumphed, you were feared and you were trifling.
Only then would their fear would substitute yours
and your pestilence would become theirs;
a simple cause for them to loathe you more
aberrance foretold, a hopeless second fiddle—
their pity, your undoing.

You would never grant them the satisfaction
of bending to their wills; of patronizing redemption.
And if the good and the righteous were to preach your evils
then you would assume those evils
to claim your only inviolable right—
the right to your scorn.

He liked spices, ginger; pleasant provocations.
You peppered your meals with pejoratives
inklings of nostalgia in the palace that is expressly not yours.
The walls mock you in their grandeur;
their harmony, your dissonance.

And in each footfall,
the grave timbre of the spear commanding their ground
your past reservations accrue in the column of your throat
straining in your veins, a visceral blue
a blue of harrowing frost and ugly, ugly truths.
You were born the enemy.

Red was for the regal; you were not regal.
They deemed you a monster, child, they denied you virtue
by sedating your soul beneath impassioned deceit.
There was never a “you”—
you were who you ought to be.

Understand this—
The historians will know only of your every move
and not the clenched heart that instructed that limb to move.
Every twitch, documented as a precursor
to your malaise, the disease of oversimplified envy.
For you, they will write countless wrongs committed
for you, they will destroy the very idea of “you”.
Wherever “you” exist, he will exist to denounce you with his love.
For him, they will never see you as you are.

You could not be dead—the dead perceive nothing.
You perceive too much too soon, too often.
Leathered hands over yours, a helmet two sizes too big
peaks and ridges of stone, your ambition, your tomorrow
your land, your home, evenings of golden sunglow
a glow that had betrayed your former belonging
and belonged to you no more.

His amity—your disgrace
Your enmity—his consecration
He would have you return,
would have you forgotten twice,
to satisfy his conscience.
But you cannot impart this forgiveness,
or you would bleed yourself dry.

There is another truth, however
It is this: your animus, your self
is the bifrost bridge, reduced to jagged shards
at the hands of the hammer wielder.

And while they may never reach you
as you may never reach them
you nonetheless are scintillating in your melancholy
you, a complex composition of determinism
need not gratify a villainous role-
they wish to see you either buried or
alive to inhale their contrived scruples.

They assume you are theirs to malign, to disregard.
But how can they know?
They don’t care to know;
they prefer solutions.

You are, in this moment
as you will be for the next millennia.
Do not cave, do not let their stories grow dull
with denouements of puppets and sticks and stones
they can’t break your bones—
you are living still.