(First see Unheroic Interlude 1)
Did I introduce myself? No, I started
my saga in media res--
so, here's how I got myself
in my current mess, I guess.
If I could, I would give you my name
but I left it in another life
in my other pants, to my shame,
in a moment of strife.
I was raised in the shadow of Olympus
a cast-off twig of the family tree--
no titan, no goddess, just a mutt,
if you need any description of me.
Your eyes, the portals to your soul,
were left open, and I slipped right in.
In I fell, lost in deep water,
full immersion baptism in
the sacred river. The surface still--
but the undertow! Running
to some place guarded like
the holy of holies.
Escorted out, flaming sword at my throat,
I crept away in my soggy clown shoes,
a jester smile of astonishment
plastered on my face,
psychically thrown by unexpected grace,
wondering if I might return.
And I became aware
of something pooling deep inside of me--
the forgotten eternal spring--
the abandoned depths of my own.
The nine sisters won't play with me
so I'm counting on you, gray-eyed
and far-seeing, to remember me.
Where I left my heroine, she was
cooling her heels in the Land of the Dead.
She'll live (you knew that)
because Immortals do.
It's what they were fated to.
And as for me, I guess I'll live, too,
if I can figure out my way.
We are skipping from the Middle East to
the Mediterranean, (I've been--have you?
I've seen the rock and the hard place where my
epic crimson forbear found himself adrift.)
And here's where you find me.
Crafty one, send an owl. Whisper in my ear.
Get my stupid ass out of here.
Here I am: not in the dark of the Underworld,
but in the bright light of day,
chained to a mountain of bullshit,
vultures gnawing at my ever-renewing
last living fuck.
The mountain is my own bullshit,
the vultures exist in my mind,
and the chains are those I forged in life,
whatever the Dickens that means.
And I am not sure how to stop torturing me.
To break with
the rules and to use these
materials,
despite all warning;
to reverse Noah, to
submerge and not to
float away from disaster,
but to view death as if
preserved in ice--
a specimen removed from the
current threat--
disrupted the pact between
us and the deep.
The intent to view death
through a porthole,
fulfilled faster than eyeblink,
as death rushed in, mercifully
faster than understanding could or
last regrets.
We who lived with their
indeterminacy,
the Schrodinger's sub,
imagined horrors within horror
worse than life itself.
The lungs of acid, brains of fire,
hallucinations of sirens,
Titanic ghosts,
kamis with mouths like lampreys,
shimmering things with seaweed
in their claws,
to depict an underworld with
laws not like ours.
We imagined last conversations
with one another and with a Maker
who understood and did not
forgive and doesn't,
silent as the water still and deep around them.
And yet the water came in
waves like blades in the pressurized depths,
crueler than any human cut-
cleaner overall.
Tragedy holds no thrall for me,
I leave them here and for all time
the guests of the sea.
Neither deserving nor undeserving,
just unfortunate and fateful,
unheeding of warnings,
the victims of the depths of curiosity
and the heights of hubris,
Icarus in his fall,
to something lower than the land
is all.
