Incarnation - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 9 – Polimnia

“The last time Patmos visited,

I heard the echo of a hiss, the seethe

of angry thought I buried deep

beneath the ocean where his isle lay

before arising to the light—

now not an echo, but a roar,

And he shall see an angel calling,

Babylon is fallen!

And from a white cloud thrusts

a sickle on the clusters of the vine

whose grapes are fully ripe.

Each island fled away from air;

each mountain disappeared...
“It's not your fault,” she says.

“John always heard what others could not hear.

That afternoon Yeshua wandered on the shore

of Kinneret, hailed Zebedee and his two boys

whilst they repaired torn nets inside their fishing-boat,

John glimpsed the Baptist reborn in Yeshua's face,

and Zebedee beseeched John's brother James

to go and try to keep John safer than his namesake,

as when Herod heard Yeshua's fame, he said,

It is the Baptist, risen from the dead.

Ironically, it wasn't tender John but sturdy James

whom Herod's heir beheaded ten years afterward,

while John survives, and all the demons in him.”

“Their voices I remember well.”

And some are all mankind's,

the poor old guy.”

Homeward -Muse's Advisory, Dec. 10 – Polimnia:
The sea rears up at Arki's Knob.

The prosarious beats the rowers' rhythm,

all the while scowling at the Galilean raving,
“A whore sits on a scarlet beast;

her forehead is named Mystery.

Come out of her, my people,

for she hath lived deliciously

as a widow without sorrow:

merchants of the earth wax rich

by her abundance of delicacies,

of fine linen and purple and silk,

of scarlet and tangy thyine wood,

of vessels of ivory and of brass,

of iron and marble and cinnamon.”
Oh, to take his sword and air

that Jew's malodorous brain!

Four more leagues to Cape Crane.

Ash - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 11 - Clio:
Miriam sits alone

and John climbs up the hill once more.

and opens her palms in greeting.

a knife.
Zeus steps out

from behind the house

and issues forth

a lightningbolt

more feeble even

than the stroke

that he produced

although disastrously

on Semele's demand,

are burnt to ash

and with them

the last shred

of his intelligence.

88% Perspiration, 8% Inspiration & 4% Urination - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 12 – Polimnia:
Tom, per favore!

Much too much

of all that

John of Patmos stuff!

We got the gist!

Go back

before your last two

loyal readers

lose their minds

and cut their wrists!
Hunger revisits cats

passed out

oblivious to all but belly-bliss

after a final feast

of putrid octopus.

On distant Patmos

candle-lighters

light one candle less.

The fat green olives

have turned blond.
Zeus comes

after a week away.

Grief-stricken Miriam

invites him sit

and quench his thirst

with purple wine;

he wraps her

with his brawny arm

and lets her drench

his shirt with tears.
While stars

in constellations fixed

immortalize the lives

of Cassiopeia, Orion,

Castor and Pollux,

unanchored Miriam asks

at last to learn

of Zeus's other children,

lovers, several wives.
He stands up, smiles,

refills two bowls

and breaks a loaf

of bread in two.

Why not? he thinks.

The evening air

is cool and still enough

to hear tales only

to be whispered once.
“How much time do you have

for listening?” he asks.

"It's been

a long and fertile life.”
“I have all night.”
Va bene?

Is that enough

of an entrée

for you to stay

on track

for 20 minutes

while I run

back up

and take my pee?

to be his specialty, Melpomene.”

An older women

who has tooled around the block

a couple times is less susceptible

to easy charm."
“Teenage girls are moony—

but this getting pregnant

and denying there was screwing?

Are they liars, or deluded?”

and then a second tidal wave

wells from the womb,

that seals your fate."

Go on.

Sketch out the scene,

I'll try to fill in the psychology.

I do remember

adolescence's immense insanity.”
“What happened exactly

I can't recall, the god explained—

one of those primal things

the crocodile brain controls.

My second conquest, though—

a young Phoenician girl—

her I remember in detail!

Oh, how I set the trap!

I hid to study her

behind a thickly batted cloud

and laid seduction plans

she'd be unable to resist!

I gave myself the form

of a cute calf who trotted up,

bright daisy in his mouth:

she put a garland on my neck.

Next thing she knew—”
“I've heard this one.

She climbs onto his back

and feels the unsuspected stir

of sex when he starts galloping.”

Sometimes a second animal

waits in a lover's heart—

bloodthirsty brute within a Trojan Horse.

By the time you see it, it's too late.

As Ovid wrote,

He feels himself a god who has the right?

Frustration, from some impotence?”
"Zeus said to Miriam,

To call us powerful,

possessed of strength

but not control,

is a mistake.

Such weakness

I would come to rue

a little further down life's road—
soon break my own

heart too,

attacking Leda.”

His Past, 2 - Muse’s Advisory, Dec 14 – Euterpe:
“In the fens downstream from Sparta—”

Zeus begins, then takes a lengthy sip.

“—a skinny-dipping fille,

already pregnant by a man,

I forcibly implanted

with an orb containing god.”

Yeats grieved.

the dawn of right and wrong.

But all attempts to make amends

to Leda afterwards

just made things worse—

apologies upon deaf ears

and orchids scattered to the ground.

So one omnipotent, omniscient,

learned that some cats can't be

put back in the bag.

Gaze upward, Miriam:

Castor and Pollux, twin charioteers

who rode forth from the womb

alongside mortal, all-beguiling

Clytemnestra and the half-blood

Helen, rape bait too—

those brothers icy in the sky

will still be frozen there

the night I, unforgiven, die."
“My Love,” says Miriam,

and tips the bowl into his cup again.

“Sins are indelible

despite Yeshua's pledge,

but they shed no more light

on us than lantern-flies.

Gaze up, yourself,

and make a wish upon the triple

halo girdling yon Jupiter's head.”

Simulcast - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 15 – Polimnia:

"...U.S. Army propagandista Glenn Miller,
il trombettista famoso e band leader,
manca in azione con due aviatori Alleata
sopra la Manica Inglese in un UC-64...

“You just can't just park

them there as pets.”

“It's the best show on the mountain!

Let's go check it out tonight."

     Glass #3 of vino,  though,

     is always a mistake.

“ ...a bordo di due Boeing 767, acclamato TV 

sceneggiatore David Angell morto insieme con 
un pilota denominato ironicamente Victor Saracini 
e tutti dell'equipaggio, passeggeri e  dirottatori...”

Zweikampf/Duel - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 16 – Thalia:
Warten Sie! honks Hitler,

several poets further back.

Herr Glenn Miller

was a traitor to his volk

and when his plane went down

he got what he deserved!

Fräulein Amelia Earhart

was a Teutonic traitor too!
Madman, your point?
Wait, Ersatz Byron interrupts.

What's Hitler doing here?
He dreams of glory, same as you.

Revisionists insist

if he can triumph as an artist,

much less blood will flow.

He'd rather be a Rilke or a Goethe

than mass-murderer.

Warten Sie! Hitler

repeats hot-headedly.

Who's this interrupter

with a hooked Semitic nose?

Jews ruined poetry

as well as Germany—

you've read Heine.
I'll knock your block off, buddy!

exclaims Byron's #1 Admirer.
Boys, boys.

Fistfights and duels

must be conducted

in that glade

and by strict rules

laid down by

Eugene Field:
Come half past twelve

by the old Dutch clock,

& then at twenty paces

take turns firing feet

into each other's faces.
Repeating 'Jesus was a Jew'

can't make it true!

the Führer cries. Galileans

were Assyrians, King David

was a Moabite, and Zeus

himself—
—ein Hamburger?
The Nazi leapt

at him,

his lips spit-flecked
but Byron Hopeful

bared a trochee,

Gotcha!

Bearded Vultures - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 17 – Calliope:


Laboring from the gladiators' graveyard
two lammergeiers bear a dead slave's
thighbones up to rocky fastnesses to crack
against the utmost crags and spill
the lusty marrow down their craws.

“We have to free ourselves, and John,”

Zeus says, sipping his wine. “Come back
with me to my cave for a week or two
and once he sees you've left we can resume 
our afternoons here by your spring.”

“He'll be bereft.”

“He tried to cut your throat. He imagines
you a monster now. It's better he believes
Yeshua came and whisked you up to paradise.
Besides,  my place is very nice.
The last time I had live-in company,”
he says with a sly grin,
“I had to send the sheets out twice.”

“You are  Zeus Apomuios, Shoo-er of Flies.”

Below in Ephesus, Artemis's gaudy temple
aspires a long plume of bright gold smoke
where priestesses know how to render fat
to oils that burn every color in a rainbow.

“Does that ever seem a little foolish?”  Miriam asks.

“I'm way past that,” he says.
“You see yourselves as sheep
but I see you as antelopes!
You make amazing leaps.
Look at the vultures breaking
hips apart against that bluff.
Don't underestimate the pull
of sundered blood and bone.
No, I find you breath-taking.”

“Okay, I'll go,” she agrees. “A change

of scene will do me good, and John’s
long trek here every week is killing him.”

“Ah, excellent! I'll ask our neighbors

up for shish kebab and drinks. 
The great thing about them—” he winks—
“is they have no idea. They think
they're in some cockeyed transmigration
scheme. Wait till you talk to them.”

“Will you return them to their lives?”

“They don't know it but their old life is
continuing: they're duplicates. The day
I let them see what's happened since I
brought them here they'll be like gods.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“It's dimensions five and six.”

“Oh, Zeus Fysikí! What is it with guys 

and their Science? How many
of these dimensions have you made?'

“I have to have my secrets.”

The lammergeiers hurl their freight 
against the stone and echos sound
like somebody may have broken
the gates and finally made it home.

Waiting in Endless Lines - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 18 - Tom to Calliope:
Excuse me,

Miss All-That

with the overpriced writing tablet -

not that you paid for it -

it's product placement, right?
You put yourself in stitches

calling me Ape Byron or whatever

but it's meatless sandwiches like me

that feed your fame

...well, yes, there's Homer...but

still...what gives you the gall

to dangle tasty shreds of beef

and line us up like fingered Jews

to pluck the gold teeth

from our gums

before you turn us into glue?
WE ARE THE POETS!
This young man in front of me

you promised mastery of terza rima?

And this lady just behind, the key

to writing like a lady Bukowski?
TEXT WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
...Or what? Go ahead, say it—

you'll call the Mt. Parnassus poetry police

and have us booked and banished

someplace shittier than Greece?

At the Table - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 19 – Calliope:
“Boost me 1000 places up in line?”

Byron Boxtops sneers, almost preening.

“If Viktor Frankl had agreed to that,

we'd never have Man's Search for Meaning!

If we poets go on strike,

this field is bare

except for rabbits and bleached trunks

of what a future archeologist guesses

to be ruins

of nine forgotten demi-goddesses.”
Don't threaten us, you ingrate!

The earth will turn as it has always turned

with or without the poor excuse for exumbration

you call poetry! We don't spark, blow on, and stoke

your mental cigarettes for our own kicks;

if any of you puffers want to quit,

then be my guest.

Amity - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 20 – Polimnia:
“Oh my!” cries Byron's Flea.

“Here comes the schoolteach

with her veil, Good Mistress Harmony

to salt the slugfest's tail

and clean up after

Calliope iPad's quick retreat

behind a swirl of cheat sheets

for Today in History -

a girl

born

to the "Funky Drummer" beat,

or

Heybeliada's Aziz Nesin's

Yüreğim gövdeme sığmıyor

Gövdem odama

Odam evime sığmıyor

My body won't fit my heart

My room my body

My house my room.

So, ladies and gentlemen,

to soothe the troubled water,

I give you Polimnia's Soft Sale!”

Indeed that's why I've come.

For tre millenni

muse and poet saw eye to eye

and the trivium thrived.

Why throw all that away now

in a pissing contest?

Our bad. You're il creatore.

We got bored,

carried away,

we bit off more than we could chew

from a piece of the pie

that belonged to you.

At most,

I ask an invocation:

that's how Homer scratched

our egotistic itch.

But, if you prefer, we don't exist:

just your name

blazoning the frontispiece.
“How can I refuse?” he grins.
Just call me La Musa Eufonia OG.

Pilgrimage - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 21 – Me:
I advance,

2,145,230 to 2,145,229.

It all seems worth it now—

80 pages on a flash drive,

my moment of truth

at the top of the line

increasingly irrelevant,

the pilgrimage

more tonic than the shrine.
“Why not come home?”

Penny and Telly implore.

“Dear husband, father,

hop that next bus back from Lourdes?”

I can't, I say.

(a) I'm bored to tears

(b) I crave applause

(c) I'm seeking love

(d) all, two, or none of the above.

I'm still not cured.

Zeus's Cave - Muse's Advisory, Dec. 22 – Urania:
The track to Zeus's cave almost impassable

through thickets bristling with nightingales,

they lose sight of the city, harbor, then the sea itself,
at last emerge into an arbor of apricots and a crystal

pond whose fish wear golden necklaces and earrings

on their heads and rise as Zeus calls out their names

and tosses each a bit of bread.

Above, a bluff:

a granite tripe of dark mouths fed by curving stairs

rock-carved beside great Doric columns

and human figures in relief,

some fully fleshed, some skeletal.
“The Seven Sleepers Cave,” Zeus indicates.

“Myth says they travel underworlds nobody's ever seen—

when they awake, will speak in tongues not heard before

and plant seeds in the Carian earth that will give grow

as military oaks. In the meantime, they're good neighbors.

So too, up there, the Bedouin cocooned in spider's silk.

That swank cave next to his is mine.”

“It's lovely here,” breathes Miriam.
“Don't worry about noise!” Zeus cries.

“I've practiced yodeling and thunderclaps alike

up here and not a single eyeball's even roamed its lid.

You're in the country now: the rule of thumb is,

the more noise you make, the less chance bear

or tiger will mistake you for an ibex without horns!”

“Delightful, dear,” she says.
“On clear days,” he continues, one arm stretching east,

“you see so goddam far, you think it must be Parthia.

It's not, of course, but when the Persians come it's quite

a sight, those lower passes gushing horses like a river.”

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