Prologue

When Man first took the Earth complete in hand,
and made of it a heaven of their own-
the first to go were barriers of flesh-
and last to go were barriers of heart.
Together, all them seep’d within and deep
among those throngs, they sated failing souls
til each was softly kept aloft by sweet reprieve
and held in mothers arms by kin unbound.

Until they lost all sense of who they were,
and so The Fool was nestled there as well-
Accepted for so long as all the souls
of humankind still reach’d to feel their kin.
Though time it took beyond the grasp of them-
and underneath, the Earth would turn unseen,
but lastly then they came to each one who,
in joining all, were weigh’d- and found unfit.

‘You’ they said unto The Fool, and turned
‘til all around him were the eyes of all
the world, orating in a single voice
of baritone and layer’d alto roar:
“This blacken’d hem so nearly humankind-
what folly gave the likes of you to us?”
The haze of bliss beyond compare, The Fool,
unspeaking, only heard the tone beneath.

And so, too late, he felt the claws of all
his brothers, now of single-mind, who all
at once declared what They knew to be true:
“This thing is less than man, and while our souls
can sate the weary, pull its kind to light,
there in this thing exists a poison short
of what We can extinguish, say We all.
And suffer not will Man the likes of he.”

Then, out from Their new Eden he was cast,
returning to his Self, and to his voice.
He scream’d out through the fall and beg’d
to know what he had done, but silent all
were Them, and rid of him at last They sighed,
the final pity ever felt by Man,
of learning hunters’s first bestowing Death,
repulsed to think the fate left to The Fool.

“For We Are Many” They said.

“And He is alone.”