Double Edge of the Rapier

..."you experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point up to the approaching locomotive of steel, coal and steam, and you don't abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it." -Franz Kafka, from "The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1913."

I could say I'm better off without, believing it a lie
Does that we once were green together
in the same shared slip upon some time
ever haunt your re-formed mind?
Consumed by fruits of your labor, you grind
I wither along hallowed shores of the Nile
Anubis and Osiris bid me come
Tell me I have a pharaoh's smile
I have been the ideal
Patron of nature, magician, friend of sinners
I hear petitions of the downtrodden
Will you yet confess, yield your harvest here?
Daughter of the sacred earth, I resurrect
your dying pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus)
flank his naked wings, habituate your
deserts and arroyos, westwardly piercing -
rasping cries echoing off crisped, sere canyons
Every rhetorical climax of Poe could apply here
self-perpetuating, developing, insisting
so long as these same conditions prevail
Parry no more - fold into this knight's caress
I will only welcome, but I travel West no more.

~ARCantu * 2010 *