PHAETHON IS A PERSONIFICATION of the glorious death of the sun.
He lies in the lush grass beside a lover of fire and gold, tongue and limb and mind interwoven into her until they are a thing of one. The sun, angered in the sky, sits on his chariot of blazing paradise, and points a finger at Phaethon. Day after day, his tantrum reigns. How dare you, he seems to screech.
Phaethon is the epitome of forging the past, for his past has been overturned by his tongue a little too often, has sat in the pit of his stomach a little too long. And for this reason alone, Phaethon is set on fire when the sun reminds him. A tantalizing lie slicing his mouth with its sharpness. How dare you.
His lover shoves her torn love through her teeth, tosses it around in holy prayers. The honeybee of Phaethon's lust for her brain stung her in the heart, and she worshiped him. Worshiped her golden boy, tragedy struck your heart boy, with both eyes closed from the brilliance of his heavenly touch. But Phaethon disregards her; to him, she is just another one, another one of those girls who chased after him like the moon chased after the Earth and would chase him still. Arms outstretched, they chase him, fingers tagging the weathered Greek olive tree of his beauty, and then losing him all over again.
The sun crawls down on his knees next to a perished Phaethon. Lies down right next to a sad, liquored god like a dog on a leash. His lover, a young girl of modern art and wasted youth, is astonished, more in love than ever, and she interprets the scene and comes to the conclusion that her lover is the sun. Everything revolves around my baby, she dreams, intestines decaying on the grass like succulent fruit, and peach juice gathers limp in the palms of her brown hands. My baby is a god.
I've got a burning abomination for your mistakes, the sun hisses, twisted and paralyzed, in snake form. A holy icon of paradise, he reaches into Phaethon's brain and beckons all the things he's been trying to forget. Phaethon struggles against the weight of his hands, the weight of his every mistake. They eat him like moths, terrorize him with his golden days.
And so Phaethon lies on the grass, remembering the yawning dawn, when Eos tore apart the sunrise and Helios's golden chariot of flowering sunshine soared through the sky. Phaethon would look up to his father in an aura of vain and hungry eyes, gazing as Helios warmed Gaea with the iridescent sheen of the sparking sun, lit up the shimmering rivers and Gaea swayed with the flowers and the wheat. A song of mother earth.
Hatred numbs the bones of Phaethon as he recalls how he had never lived to grow into the legend that his father was. He had never said good morning to the baby buds of the roses, had never gotten to water the plants with angel's tears. All he ever did was crash the sun into the earth and kill the stars. A god with the sun a glowing crown atop his head, and he grew up to be a snake instead.
Time kills him once more.
august 12, 2017
