PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I beg to differ
with your assessment of yourself---
a somewhat inflated interpretation
of your contribution to History:
your place, in ours, is not as grand as you think.

You did not
bring about the twentieth century.
You merely performed
some brutal death rites, wet with blood sacrifice,
of your own century, the nineteenth---
(where so many bodies are buried
for so little returned
on the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh,
and the pride of life:  the imperials)---
twelve years before its numeric end.

Coincidentally, our century commenced
twelve years after its numeric beginning.
Conceived at a draftsman's desk,
assembled in the Langan River,
and launched (in that twelfth year) upon
the unfathomable sea of time:
unchristened, with a facetiously boastful challenge
(more boastful, even, than your own remarks, long before)
to the power of God Himself Almighty.

Adorned like a highborn, noble maiden,
making her first storied voyage
to the storied lands of a bold new world
(symphonic sounds orchestrate to Bohemian themes):
she could not be aware of the chilling obstruction
lurking ahead, in the darkness
unidentifiable until upon her),
yet so calm and still around, a perfect night.
The protrusion's sharp edge slitted her length,
buckling plates and popping rivets
as easily as knife slices through
the trembling throat of an impoverish whore.

This (not long followed by a bald-headed lawyer in Moscow
busily avenging his brother's death;
and a failed artist in Vienna
whose fantasies were Wagnerian conflagrations)
gave birth to the twentieth century
and its unbalanced, edgy misery;

not you---cringing, craven coward
in sordid shadows fingering, finding, manhood on a blade
before you mixed it up at 13 Miller Court.