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Diocletian In His Cabbage Patch
Of course my lines are attenuated:
I am a garralous old coot, with entirely
too much to say, too much of which to complain.
I am no poet, like Hadrian---
Hadrian who squandered his great gift
(he is dead; why should I hesitate to accuse him)
on that beautiful boy Antinuous.
I thought to redistribute power in the Empire,
to a more efficient and more equitable process;
and it failed, miserably. I disagreed with the
model of government constructed by Augustus,
and now moribund after three hundred years.
I believed the presence of Christians subverted
the very identity and purpose of the Empire,
and so I took their rights, their churches, and,
eventually, their miserable lives away from them.
Their blood soaked the grasses, their screams echoed
all over the land, casting sharp slanders upon me,
and their bodies were tumbled into convenient sewers.
But Constantine has prevailed against my procedures,
and psalms sung by the Christians rise triumphantly
into the cloudless skies to the Heaven of their crucified Christ.
Even this small piece of soil struggles against me:
the cabbages I plant, each spring, require a lot of work.
My own bowels have betrayed me: all of the cabbage I eat---
these bulbous fruits of my own laborious effort---
become the most odious farts that, escaping me, burn my anus,
and assalt my nostrils with a forescent of my own internal foulness.
See those two adolescent boys in the next yard?
They like to sit outside in the sunlight, just to provoke me
with their waist-length hair (dyed lavender and pink,
respectively and irrespectfully).
Their slender and agile bodies are obviously masculine;
but their soft voices, and gentle gestures, consistently presented,
are nuanced to the distinctly feminine.
Sometimes, when they think I am watching closely,
they lean against each other for open-mouthed kisses
and the slow caress of fingertips upon bared torsos.
Once, they even offered each other a gift of sheer silk stockings---
a kind of sheath for each leg, said to have been invented
by Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, for the seduction of Mark Antony.
Always customarily barefoot, they wear these garments, also, without shoes.
I keep a small pile of stones in convenient reach:
these I will throw at them if they ever mount each other.
These are the words of Diocletian, Imperator (retired),
patriot of our precious Roman way of life and existence.
Starward
