Read These

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom

where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love

before at last taking himself away. His head away. His

recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine

themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more

than instruments of his creation. Pawns.

Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us

studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.

Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down

from the high dive. The contest was seriousness

he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius

and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins.

Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping

his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web.

He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider

and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread

and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back

and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came

to hate the court he held.

He was crowned with loneliness

and suffered for friendship, for fealty

of the noblest sort. The invisible crown

rounded his temples tighter than any turban,

more binding than a wedding band,

and he sat in his round tower

on the rounding earth.

                                                     Read these,

saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing

himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest

aspects of the human heart

with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable

as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex.

I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face.

And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc

bag was an air-tight chamber

for the regal head—most serious relic,

breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.