Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Hello Trickster

Once upon a time, love, you were real. Before I turned you to myth. Before I filled your memory with spices and wrapped you in linen strips. Before I entombed you in thick walls and left no crack for reality to shine through. Before I left you to lay there in the darkness... preserved, perfect, pointless.

Sometimes I visit your catacomb. I creep in when no one is looking and I trace the outlines of stories I've written on the walls. Some of them are true, some are not, but I never touch the ones that actually happened. I lie alongside you in the dark and listen to the scarab beetles burrow for the sun. I tell you secrets that you already know and you become more godlike with every word I sink into you. But your kingdom is limited to these four walls and since I am the creator I cannot worship, so your divinity remains unexercised.

But you, the real you, you walk this earth like any mortal. You know nothing of the hours we spend in the dark, you've never heard the stories I've scratched into the walls. You move about in the waking world, putting to shame every moment I lie in the dark.

Only one of us lives in a tomb.


When Baldr died, the gods all cried
for his end was harbinger of Ragnarok

But you and I, hidden inside
even Herne and the Wild Hunt we would mock.

For they cannot find us in el-Kurru,
they do not look under a desert moon,
and they would not think to search a tomb.
Such is the way of every myth.