Poem: Song of an Outcast

 

Song of an Outcast

 

brilliance flooded through me.

i became a crossroads

in the quandaries of Athena.

the connections 

carved me out like a trench.

there were parched scorpions

and rattlesnakes of thorns.

fossils flipped under my soles,

revealing the truths of the whys.

 

in that moment, i pitied the gods

and had stamina to wrestle

the most dangerous angels.

power lost its daring and thrill,

able and eager to forfeit the game.

it was all a sparse opiate, anyway,

what kept the players going.

omniscience needed its tools.

 

looking down,

through a bliss of nanoseconds,

at love and beauty,

at the way their flaws avoid all failure;

how their tears light moral candles,

these the only real light,

it became clear to me

that the rest was just the prestige:

assemblages of unfolding math,

or what was before, or after this,

those much darker, larger oceans

on either side.

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