sculptor

I saw your play on Thursday but couldn’t make sense of anything

After I took my seat I grew rabid and weak, while my hands and my feet were elsewhere

Clawing towards some victory so far from the truth

It was just so I could say “I outshone the beast” waiting down for me on the horizon line

That hungry darkness, busy swallowing cities, could not reach me on that mountain peak

Many things I thought of on my clambering pandering journey

I had to live somehow. A charcoal drawing my brother did

in year seven, the food I hid in the closet; but mostly I thought of your bronze face

staring down at me

I too could be a marble statue

So I set to work making myself and all the rest

into an instrument, I learned percussion

Smoothing and detailing my body away until I was nothing

short of perfect, pre-eminent, an eye to see all the world

But by the end there was not enough of me left

to be half as good as what I used to be

I was the smallest god in the smallest known galaxy

By the time I climbed back down

The Beast had taken my throne

Meanwhile the tangerine sun rose against my throat, I clawed and clawed

And suddenly my only legacy was a tombstone