More Hephaestus Than Apollo                                                                               

I know you miss the eon before

they slashed your budget. When

production and demand ran free.

Plenty of time to wait out an idea,

watch its manifold petals lazily

coruscate like basalt brewing

in a drowsy old volcano.

But Apollo’s languid ego festered

barely behind your back— at one

of his millennium-long astral orgies,

murmuring, Olympia will be stripped

bare if we continue allotting luxuries

to lesser forms. Then lifted his perfect

septum as proof of the anointed sigil

to breed a race of fey, self-cherishing

geniuses from whose company your

like was disjected in fevered haste.

Given no recourse by your embarrassed,

wine-shambled father—

dreadfully sorry, boy, but you know mother

adores her Australian Opal bidet, and uncle

his autumn-sealskin slippers. And then

there’s the legion of half-blood little bastards

whose breeders come banging at my gates,

demanding demigod status or elaborate housing

on Syphonos, and well, you know sacrifices

are necessary to keep this thing in order—

you slouched into the toilet and split yourself

into a serviceable legion of labor.

A broken crucible teeters atop the forge,

reminding you that nothing stays whole

under incalescent brutality. On our midnight

visit, we are staggered by the sight of you

drawing back the furnace door, smiling to

expose the feral, condensed sun roaring

in its viscera. The platinum horses will be

transparent, you say. Of this much I am certain.

11/9: The Fall of American Democracy, 2017