The Ophiolaters

I remember walking up that great bald slope with him,
mentor and friend Mentor whose visage Athena stole,
who walked with the slow plodding of the damnable,
and who, I wish to reiterate, was my friend.
But I went down the mountain alone
preparing in my mind to be my own Mentor or else to be,
in the end, sacrificed as he was,
like the priest at Nemi, like Balin and Balan,
like Odysseus ought to have been,
by the worshipers of the antediluvian gods who shed their participles
and leave behind the slime of their trail
and writhe about in the dust ever since they were punished
for a crime they did not commit.
The ophiolaters stood encircled by their own
swords drawn and downpointed beneath the hoods they wore
as they waited to sacrifice my friend
by torchlight.

The Lion

Across his lips are flecks of gore
like Bagdemagus king might have wished
from all my friends found wanting
by the strength of lion rampant, Nemean,
insoluble and mighty,
whose wrath and hateful breath inspired the dragons
as I read argued in a book so very long ago.

And now he graces the crown of that immortal,
Hercules or the Cypriot Lord-of-Beasts
with leonine posture and a mane to match
and the cub and club in each hand.

In another well-argued and should-be-ancient-now treatise
I read of that club and its affinity with the pillars of Ithaca
as Odysseus had brought or sent it home with him
alongside the armor of Achilles which graces
a statue that pales before Hector's majesty.
He does not bear the icon of the lion.

The Branch

There upon the plane that does not exist within the moor,
far too false and facile for any home but the maze or home itself,
lies the aborted offering insubstantiated upon itself,
the wooden table altarized for what-is-no-longer-wooden,
that thing which has gone on enduring from the time
when deathly father and deadly sons sealed from sunlight
only to corrupt the seals placed upon their graves.  How could they not?
Lord of Graves and graven images whose wordless wonders lie beneath the earth
down barrow-ways, beneath the stone uncarved and caved
And I remember that tutorial I saw long ago:
"How to crush slav(e)s and frogmen."
Take up your axes and lop away the nefarious polysemy
of all branches but this one.

Introduction

Hi all, this is just a post to let you know about the new blog.  I'm planning on posting anything that might be better read than listened to (or for which the written version might be a good supplement).  I'm imagining that'll mostly be poetry but I might also post short stories or essays (if I end up writing any anytime soon).  Thanks for reading.

Arlen