New Crimson Nativities

3/13/2025

Bring me poets with broken hearts.
Bring me songbirds that feel this biting air as I do.
Bring me the wines gone sour, the stale bread.
I cherish it all the same.
I am the king of the lesser, of the aged.
I am the prince of a wishful life.

The rise and fall of beautiful things is music to my ears.
My labours tarnish, burn, rot, collapse.
The aqueducts of my sandstone cities abound in rust.
The streets reek like blood.
The space hangs heavy with grand creatures long gone.
The silence mourns.

What a joy it is to see my greatest works dashed to pieces.
Better yet to dash them myself.
And when a mistake brings down the foundation
just before the last of the veneer is on,
Then what glee there is in that spectacle!

What can this world do to a thing with a taste for fire?
How can it hurt what finds pleasure in pain?
Where is pain when the nerves that conduct it are so far gone,
to fires so numerous and mundane?

“Up and up!” They cry around me,
“Up and up and up!”
Little pieces fall here and there, the mound shifts-
Its slope is not as desired.
And the worker of that missing jut hurls himself down in shame.
“It was briefly taller!” He screams, “and now it is not!”
He cannot feel the whole mound rise beneath him.
He only feels the pressure of his leap.

When the workers land beside me, I make log cabins out of their ribs.
I make meat-mash stucco.
And when my little carrion cabins collapse,
I say “Oh no!”
“I am so far down! I have nothing to throw myself off of!”

But soon I will forget, and make a new crimson nativity.
And if I am patient, there will always be more meat to play with.