do not look for me in the sullen sunlight.  for the shadows I cast
will have passed you on the way to the marketplace where you trade
your simple smiles and topographic truths for a slice of cold vermilion.
I dance in the darkness now, where echolocation shows me the paths 
tread in dread of the deadly sins spun of gossamer and a thuggee's wire,
wrapped about a throat in midsong.  long before the final words were.
there was I.
mendacity and the mention of a pretention perceived, relieved in a sigh
that passes for a laugh on the altar of a threes calves sacrificed
for an indolent and immature deity.  a temple-child for those beguiled
too easily by a practiced shell of spontaneity and ritual slaughter.
within me, a water broke and the three-headed dog that guards hell
tore lose from his placental leash.  Caeser ceasing not to seize the crown.
there was I.
when the three riddles were woven of the Gordian braid and made fast.
when the five words were spoken and a vow broken in tepid timidity.
when the first seven were handed down like tablets etched for a prophet.
when the nine shadows proved to not be enough for the test of truth.
when the eleven songs I could not sing were whispered in a contest of wills.
when the thirteenth canto proved the final word, read, but still unheard.
there was I.
when they find the shell, remember well the prophecies of the chrysalis.
a kiss with half a liter of truth would have cured the leprosy, but freedom
is but a crumb to be held out in illusion for children not yet evolved enough
to understand the tenor of traps drawn tight and plucked like cithara strings
in the courtyard of a palace cut from the fabric of history to be treasured.
not measured like cloth on a yardstick cut from a corkscrew tree.


copyright William F. DeVault (wfdv)