There’s Herakles now,
I wall not shant,
eagled spread about the armchair,
leg propped up,
skirt hiked, airing the jewels,
The Sword is my Leopard, I wall not…
nectar drips from the walls,
as you would imagine,
the vined columned portico –
with a frieze of Athena popping off on Hephaestus,
who Father Nature becomes to the cruel Chthon –
some slight disrepair
where the wallpaper
peels, the plaster chips,
in need of a woman’s touch,
but Gads! the work
involved with that, and Herakles
laughs at the bite of a love bug.
Scratches the nit
on the perineum, lights a Camel, stretches
to stand and adjust.
Taller than most at six a.m.,
Herakles grabs a pear from the still
life on the endtable, and idles
into a fresco that Caravaggio
never intended to dabble
(always dreams of Pollock, the fraud,
the why didn’t I think of that,
all this concentration towards getting the shadow
just right, and he, with a drip,
with a spill, hoodwinks centuries of theory
dream that covets the rest of Rembrandt,
the nights of Bruegel,
the pillow of Piero di Cosimo),
the one where he beats his tooter with his lute,
all the while unable to get
Brubeck’s Blue Rondo a la Turk to stop
playing at his lobe –-
dododododo, dodiddododdidilooooo –-
Brother Itchifleas is exhorting him,
‘C’mon, ‘Klees, let him up!’
but too late, as pulped tutor
is now forever meditating
upon the verdant greens, whilst in the trig fee
just off canvas, to the left,
Daphne the Dryad is all
a-twitter
at the display of passion,
the blippled ruddied biceps
and the quite bent lute,
now barely serviceable
as a tire iron,
or a boomerang.
Stage back, behind the rapidly molting
pile of remaindered human bone
and what was once skin,
there are three sheep:
a honker,
a head in the sand
and one turned away to dream
of chasing a brilliant lilac monarch that has
momentarily turned its attentions
away from the drama Caravaggio
imagined for posterity.
His task at hand, Herakles tosses
sweet Daphne a shrug
and the boomerang,
and departs that scene,
landing on the errant
divan where moments before
Alcmene was lounging, at nap, irritable
and hungry.
Hot dog! and Heigh ho!
and Herakles gives Alcmene a slip
of the old whatfor,
invokes his daddy’s name, and leaving
her sated, spent and torn,
grabs a feather of Pegasus’ wing
to tickle a particularly hard to reach
itch on his lower back.
There are labours to perform,
lions to slay and skin,
boars to capture, mares to steal,
apples to steal, meals to snare,
three-headed cogs to grind
in the greater wheel of capture,
release,
capture, release,
relent, repent,
repeat.
It had to be meta something,
all the Greeks flying about,
and betta’ to be meta
than post anything.
You, the royal You, are metathetical,
and have a propensity to mispeak;
postthetical,
and perhaps you are employed gainfully,
and perhaps you are slooping
on the street, schtupping your muse
for anyone who will drop a dime,
or an ear.
Herakles spackles in the moonlight,
filling in the crevices of his wounded caryatids,
or enhancing their natural given
enchantments, singing,
a doo run run run, adieu ron ron.
Easier work than rinsing
down the Augean stables if you can
get it, Herakles hangs a sign on his
bell: Hiro for Here, Lust May in Pove, and waits,
no gatherer, he, but a cold shot of history’s
template and tempus-tossed dichotomy.
He does not mourn the Stymphalian Birds
or their nasty brass sagitarian claws;
let Lyra rise, it’s lyric vulture’s wings
of tack and tick and fine aluminum siding,
let these birds of prey have at his eyes,
(Samson only imagined himself
a contemporary.)
Herakles does not blunder blindly
after anything or anyone,
well, save the Oracle –-
deceptive delphic whore of Apollo –-
and is not overly given to introspection;
good thing, too, as he might find
himself dismayed at the metaphorical direction
his narrative has turned –-
far left to the land of speeding assortments,
and skeptical
Erato, thralled to the cyclonian forces
that batter shores of better heroes than our
stud,
gives him blond hair, or small feet, or stretched
tales of breeched clothes that conceal
barely the very piston that reached
Gaia’s core,
or was that the minotaur’s bloody bud
opened for the engendering of a nation?
The fells are contused, all confused in surreal
attempts to lake magic out
of no reason,
no reason at all –-
lake magic folds logic
at its made core, more cicadas
than not, more leechings
against the fall of night,
the coming of the eternal time
of indeciduous moral heroes,
sixelated puns of the gods,
their daughters gone,
taken,
absconded with, turned
to bear-treeing fruits,
or worse.
Here’s Herakles now.
Lounging in his velvet bathrobe,
channel-surfing for sport,
his weight lifted of duty.
What haunt capturing bulls
or botoxing fair Hippolyte’s girdle
from the loins of the daughter
of War? Was it ransom? or
consensual? Hippolyta saving
Melanippe’s fair virginity,
or entreating her own ways
upon the joint of equanimity?
It’s all confused in Erato’s
work: it’s either union,
or contusion upon bedfellows,
depends on the teller’s communion
with the tale.
Always does,
actually, whether the canvas
is fixed, or slippery, still fixed
but paid for, apples, oranges,
like the difference in you and I,
my dear, like the similarities mixed
in our streams, our bloods:
there are heroes for you, patience,
given timidity a steal for its ride.
What glory in abstination?
Herakles is at a crossroads
with no devil in the bargain,
and no soul to sell were deals
boomeranged for, gone dry to lays
of gray and fields of pinoned meal
where once direction was known.
No more. Also absconded with,
our certainties, our virginal paths
of gloried sloes of tales unfought,
unplanned for, this fenned impasse
of justification versus alienation
to prove a point, a point, repeat,
reclude, our heroes are no more,
and there’s only you and I, dear.
to fix our fading moral compass
and lay in our own fields of elysia.
Trouble me tonight to dream
again of you, again of you, again
your morning at call, the bent glass
of what was, was, was to be, to be
our shadowed pronaos vined in nectar
of our own making. Let Herakles
find his own way out of the maze.
Our task is to find the path to confront
these words we’ve set to blaze
with action: I shall not want…
©2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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