The Embers Within Us. pt 1

Mark with a circle of stone the place where I fall

And

Let me lie. 

Upon the ground

Bare your feet and sink into the grass and soil

And mark with your reflection another circle

This of the clock's hands.

  

  'I don't want to live like this but

   I don't want to die

   I just don't know how to live like this

   Like them those even who

   Are my friends.'

We are taught to wait, my people

Like Clytemnestra we might waste away

A decade or  more and for our efforts

In hesitation find rewarded our

Just lusts with loss of lover and 

Self, taking with us merely 

Vengeance which thereafter is

Not even memory but myth and

We are lost then even to understanding

Remaining in caricature

Solely - 

 
  'But the king is good and 

   The king is just and the wise

   And goodly countenance 

   Desires for our sakes.'

In my youth I feared my fire but

In marginally later years I

Stoked it and drew it to steadiness

And forged brands of bones bent and

Fused to my purpose - 

Charred like forestoak trembling before lightning

I set out with these brands and 

My blood-inked, bone-needled skin from our village and

Its thangkas, our bonobo companions wild and

Perched to watch their hairless cousin

Set out for love and war.

I must fall but first I must prepare from

The spines of those lost in both age and 

Its absence, drawn from the field

Which is our corporeal memory - its

Right angles marking our declaration

Of an inorganic and uncalled-for presence

It is thus only mine.

For the morbidity from which we fetched

The ink and needle 

Staff and sinew rope for those implements

Most holy and therefore

Detestable to Life whose whole

Is demarcated not by those straight lines 

But by its convolutions which

In metaphor we set out

And which draws me to this contest

So I may singlehandedly repopulate

The empty houses and huts

Marked by thangkas

Which no hand in generations has penned

No hand present has authored instead

Drawing on the fallacy of myth to enrich

The imagination and compel identity.

There is a prizefight which I seek the prize

  being to break open before a throng of

Ten thousand savage and starving eyes and ears with

No responsibility of attachment their

Sheer response is in the moment which reduces epochs of twenty
Thousand civilizations and roaring judges and kings through the scrim

Of their modern-day descendants - 

The prize being

Being devoured - 

I shall meet them in their den for only then

Are our fates equally proportionately soluble in

The face of one another our ferocity mends the

Remnant vestige of our civil origins or humane origins

For we are wild again and naked and armed.

  'If you are going to challenge me

   do so by being right

   not by

   being anything else or less

   and beat my skull into 

   a cube compounded by succeeding blows

  

   - this is the fee for entry -

   

   and dissolved of its natural

   resistance by the sweat

   from your face and with this

   gift present to one who is their Chief

   Adjudicant one who sweats

   charisma and marks his masculine 

   leavings on the bodies

   of those who succor unto him - '

I have my bone brands and they are

Bleachblack, starksharp, contrast in measure

Dry and hard in hands soft and tough

The color of summer peach 

(Yes, they will I've done this before)

And weapons they shall bear alone, I know not but suspect

That among their many implements will be

The severed portions of my kinfolk who like I

Had in their time no country and thus their parts - as mine will be - 

Are scattered and I am among vultures who design for themselves

No such marks which cohere a past which none now recall

Or even through inked signs interpret

We are lost - not yet.

We have no birthright no such manifest locale

Either having been of our birthright rent or

Lost as I am soon to be

That is the prize - is it not

Do I know it not already seeking

The end of my existence.

  'And today you shall learn how to fight and if you

   Do not die it will mean you have also learned

   To kill and claim flesh of strange foes fallen

   Under the scorched bones which in their  twisted

   Welds and convolutions declare the home I leave

   I have left for so long as it takes to not die - '

A biography written in charred lines across the planes

Enveloping tones equally peach or

Thereafter chartreuse - whether like olives or 

Treebark they fail to uphold their dignity

Under these gracile charbone brands - 

Mere closeness marrs and boils flesh for a lifetime

Bank these wounds they are the interest which 

Your values will and on which your values shall rely when

You are old and arthritic and your flesh is 

As grey as my beard was when I beat you

Into submission that would have been bloody

Save for the cauterizing seal with which I brand

My ownership of you -  

  'I have grabbed your deity the one and only your

   Poor religion has and exacted my tension on

   His glorious testicles and his answer is

   Muteness or whimper - for trying to make it make

   Sense I have rendered you a pariah and

   You shall know only extraordinary pain of

   Being left but it shall not be your departure

   Merely your absence which passively 

   Marks the victory declaring (always declaring!) the validity

   Of those charmarks on your back and

   Shoulders - my copyright - 

   Diametrically opposed to the growth of your being - 

   I am the deity now who shall govern your breath 

   My goodly countenance your insufferable abuse

   Hell is easy by comparison so burden yourself and

   Expect elevation and forever this contradictory

   Yoke shall be your lamented salve - 

   My legacy of when I came from the place where 

   Bones are kindling and you shall ignite

   Your carapace all being left of you

   The fires which feed your children

   Have you nothing more to say before

   We bare teeth and rattle - '