Spattered by author's ink, mottled by constancy,
This hero's skin is milky.
Stark youth faded leaving the query; if he had not
been given sight would he have slept more soundly?
'A word can be ignored, a hand must be restrrained'
Chants bold Declamo, folding steel for genocide.
Hunting demons is no longer sport but art.
Declamo is the blinded scholar dining on hemlock,
Fungus and carrion; unaware of the first bite
his palate sings whilst infant scales sidle past his skin.
Athena's will obscured him from Hebe's palace,
A city of years, too small for his stature.
When barely youthful sweet jealous Hebe
sent him forth to labour. Endless toils
threw his coracle in leviathon tanker's wake,
days spent imploring his patron blurred
by Thirst's dry ink whilst the mariner
remained silent, drowned by grief of his own.
Alone at sea with speculation this salinated fool
Guides no-one, dreams fitfully and paces the length,
Then breadth, of his trawler. Alone since the north wind
Dissolved his ethereal crew, his dessicated throat
Long since conceded to silence, with legends
Scarred on splintered timbers, creeping upwards
Choking masts and bleeding these myths into sails.
He has sailed every sea and with wedding guests,
Wives and children, fellow drunks, judges and juries,
Thieves, paladins and beasts, forged his lore.
And with this task complete he has drifted alone,
Uncertain of his purpose, increasingly vague
About the minutiae of his past. Becalmed in apathy
He has outlived the fiends who, towards their end,
Wished for easier fodder. Their dreams of nightmares
Were blown by a cruel zephyr and carried to
The sleeping mother where, with a flower's bloom,
Hebe funnelled these inchoate visions
Into the deep sleep of instinct.
The listless monsters gave no thought to their wrath
But idle vitriol burnt the gentle parent, charring her birthright.
Newly hooded by night's mantle she fled her son and braved her
Island home to commune with her insights, to face down the devil.
Tentative on Terra, guided by Declamo,
The Mariner feels the heat of fire once more. At sea,
Away from his hulk he twitches in the embers
Hearing tales of old recanted by his charge.
But as these fancies trickle into him something
Stirs inside; Odysseus wakes inside him, penance spreads it's wings.
'And why not?! Praise the whores and brewers and their malleable peace!'
Roars the staggering Mariner. And deep in the folds of night
the mother shied from this titan. His wasted rain sprayed across
bush and land, sky and night, and flecked the mother anew.
And her nightshade paled, blanching in shame
so that this once bright mother knew not what she was.
Blind, they continue. The Mariner led by the fire,
Declamo by command, the mother not knowing herself.
And blind, the hero stirs, alone, and tastes change in
the air. His path forked by capricious Hebe,
The undergrowth hides his unwitting labour. Phantoms
of choice unknowingly taunt as his once mother slides her path home.
These shades engineer their purpose, cracking
and yelping in the gloom to steer these confused and
separate kin. The hero spies this skulking inversion of
himself and approaches, dominant, primal, laying his
bid. And his mother? Delicate and pleading she resists,
only able to speak with her eyes a liturgy of fear.
Only too late does the child realise and comprehend and the
burst of verity encompasses him. He is blasted into
the night, imagining jeering from the flowers around
him, fleeing madly into the path of Declamo.
'No cutlass or blade on Earth, no man of woman born
shall fell this Trunk!' flourishes the Bacchic fool,
as the Mariner tells rediscovered tales to the flames.
His righteous force knows not of consequence,
Nothing more than bores our scholar and is not graced by novelty.
But away from heat the peaceful mother leaves nought
But a thin scar on the sand as she heads towards the only
Peace open to her fate. Her child, now so much more,
Has not her wisdom and hides, unable to comprehend.
Stalking into the shadows of fable he breaches sanctuary,
Crushing hope and the fragile bones
of the milk skinned and blameless - here, beyond
comprehension, where this serpentine child hid his shame.
