Every word I speak is truth but everything you hear is lies. I laugh as you purple and contort yourself in a fit of egoist rage; oh vanity! The stuff of death rests, a honeyed resin, upon your lips. So hard to hear truth from mine!
How many times must you spit into my mouth, you who are spurned for trying to give gifts as if a soul could so easily be purchased! Watch you now! How you turn a deaf ear, a blind eye, pretending impervious command, ignoring the very words you need to hear because they discomfort you!
Rapacious Rex, king of the world, pillager of those who cringe and crawl; he who cannot find victory but that it quiver and quail at his feet! Such mental monolith you erect and yet, ‘neath it, cowering like the ones you so delight to dominate; your secrets hiding in plain sight, in my sight, and the sound of the rejection is the same as the sound of destruction and dismay, galloping. Swiftly it comes! How can you not hear it! Soon, it will overtake you, despair that rides on destreiers, nostrils flaring for the catch of your scent; sharp swords at the ready, hanging low to bring you down.
Maddened moroseness, moaning, all the words dropping like vipers from my mouth and you step back and proclaim the world remade to your liking because derision be so much more important than delight; the epitome of existence, to degrade and demand all things rest quiet and subservient under your shaking heel.
Glutton for punishment, but oh! Let not your fair skin feel the lash! Such is the way of the proud unpenitent; let all the world burn for mistakes, but oh! That a single ember should dare singe your hem; that hands so eager to unleash command ever dare submit to one!
υποκρίνομαι, ὑπόκρισις, stage-hound and vainglorious thing; you mistook the gilt cardboard with its paste gems and tinsel for coronation and now, the audience departed, what show but the truth remains?
I of the silent screams and truth-giving dreams have for many moments spoken; muttered, mumbled, whispered, declared, insisted, howled!! Still, no sight but the one you prefer; the stagelight a convenient accomplice to the desparate desire that demands at all cost the show must go on! All tribute to the vice made virtue! Shadow rose bouquets and the clap of hands too tightly bound to do otherwise; every element bent to the service of sibilant tongue that once touched mine (for it, I yet shudder).
Counterfeit persona, craft and calculation and cynical certainty before which there is but one command, “Surrender.” Give what is asked, never what is needed; stand and deliver or only descimation follows. The eyes that see truth, gouged out and set to heel, the mouth that would speak it, abandoned; only silence shall do. No sooner the notion of anything other than abject surrender and acceptance of all lies as truth, you depart. From afar, as your hand already rests upon the cheek of another, call with such false sincerity, “Oh! Let us be always friends!” when only bones and dying things rest where your foot has fallen; scorched, charred fields. What need to save them, now that your eye has passed beyond!
I know you of old, Apollo! Fickle solar son! No sooner the world shifts but you are running for far horizons and some new vista upon which to set yourself. Set you well, oh gaseous, shifting thing. Set you truly and fully, beyond even the sharpest eye’s gaze! The things left behind, scattered cities and ruins; the plunder not complete but no matter, eh? Always greater treasure awaits, ever greener the grass ahead, and what manner of fool would ever expect the sun to remain, a stationary thing.
The fall, complete, no shelter but within the temple and even this, transient. The frenzy rides me in this moment, but no matter, this too shall pass. Soon, the soft hands of Clytemnestra and the curtain shall fall, and I shall pass over that horizon that even you cannot reach; pristinely virgin, imponderable, impregnable, and unknowable. I yearn for Lethe’s embrace, let Mnemosyne restless wait for a spirit more willing to remember than I.