I feel not of myself as trivial idolatry,
But of countless loves forlorn.
O how I've been there
Time and time again.
My predecessors,
They'd be so ashamed of me. Yet
Time and time again
I've lived like them-
Just not in the same way.
O silly me,
I know I terrify you.
I'm all inky and used,
Bruised and consumed
Under weeping oily stone.
Untouched and unturned,
Like a Burmese crab rangoon
Before the men in heaps of red
Slaughtered their villages
And onion bulb pagodas.
A hidden, hidden sun.
My predecessors,
They'd never understand
Mine own men.
O of course not!
I'd never think that true.
I do not believe mine own men
Were lost like me.
Or so I'm inclined to say
To make myself feel better.
In my heart of hearts,
I know they were not
Lost like me.
I know they know their lives--
One and two and three and four.
But they are the same men
I've loved. That, I know.
Only wearing different suits
Before they'd enact their savage murders.
The first a yellow monstrosity
In light khaki and silver buttons.
The second a raging vermillion
Spider lily dying
In his little plague.
The third a sort of creator of colonies,
Personal ones.
Not so daddy-o,
But a rattling Spanish damselfly.
And the fourth,
O the fourth!
Almost flaxen-haired, lilliputian in his size,
But nevertheless a weathered soldier
Crippled by shell shock.
O I know,
Even I am terrified!
Why subject myself to such squalor?
To such grim men.
It is only just to believe
There is a meaning amongst them
Whom does not succumb
To eternal success.
My predecessors,
The women who'd come before me
Loved and lost
The same mindless men, and still
They'd ask why I'd not love a girl,
Or to find something I'd deserve.
O I terrify mine own head
With these wants and desires.
Be that as it may.
I will continue to love.
Like my predecessors,
They will say so.
An addiction, an addiction, an addiction.
It echoes.
A man in love moves mountains, they'd say.
O I know,
I believe I'd seen it for one!
And two! And three!
Perhaps not later,
But now I do!
For some time-back-to-back,
I had seen it, even felt it, and maybe
You did too.
For me, he'd char them, sculpt them.
He'd chisel his back muscles
With the sharp rocks
Of nine jagged mountains and scrape
His hale, peachy skin bloody and raw
If it meant I'd like them more.
He'd climb them to kill monsters
At their peaks and swallow them
Whole and spit them back out
If it meant I'd like to see them disfigured.
Ugly dragons and gorgons and serpents!
For me, he'd find a way
For my sacrifices to not be in vain.
I, an Antiochian princess
Never to be sacrificed.
It was his world,
And I'd only given it to him
To eat and scream in mirrors,
Like a Celtic warrior whom spiked his hair
And colored it blonder with lime
After a fresh killing.
O so far he'd climb!
So, so far!
So much he'd sculpt and kill
And swallow and eat and
Defeat through a gladiator's shrill!
O the young lion he was.
It was the most he'd given me and more-
For he was the Catholic
Saint named George-
My very own dragonslayer.
