Peak Oil
Have you not heard?
The pen is mightier than the sword, they say,
mightier, sharper, dissevering deep
between a mortal’s spirit and his soul.
How swiftly the embodied shed their glorious clouds,
those wispy trails of echoed godliness,
only to see them blown away upon the troposphere
where Decima writes the fate of mortals high in blood upon the nimbus clouds.
But we are children no longer, Horatio.
So get you to your bridge,
lest Porcena’s Clusian hordes
pour forth to claim the sparkling citadel.
My part for now is yet to sleep the sleep,
not of the righteous or the dead,
but of the yet unborn
while you make for me a world that you are proud and honoured to bequeath.
And I too in my turn will call upon your name when darkness comes
and campfire fellows call for stories of the glorious men of old.
Let not your epitaph be silence
for the shame of mighty deeds, still needful, left undone.
Roar forth those crie d’arms, man of Mars!
The noble seek for nothing more
than leave to sing of virtuous acts,
of maidens, compromised or saved,
and the long repented genocide of
Shamans reincarnate put to death.
*****
Is it now that you would pass to me
the crystal horn
wherein mortality’s elixir,
well lived and nobly sacrificed to virtue,
still dwells on?
*****
I am come from going to and fro upon this earth of yours
and walking up and down upon it.
I have seen your world, Horatio;
a world where whitened caskets,
brim filled with hopes and the half formed dreams of nations
are carried shoulder high and laid within sarcophagi of much loved fables once believed;
where Ideless March, a centrifuge of legends long postponed,
spins fairground horses up to Pegasean flight
and dwarfish men shave off their beards
with razor swords once honed
to sever heads of long corrupted slime-formed orcs.
Breathe on me breath of gods!
Was it in divine inebriation
you chose for this to be my time?
Your random purpose summons me to birth,
for of the many called I am the chosen;
called for my turn to walk upon the earth
chosen to hold my watch upon that unmanned bridge,
no longer with a sword and shield,
but tapping out a jolly tune upon the keyboard of an i-phone 5
while soaps flake sadly down upon a weary flickering screen.
“Peak Oil,” they cry, these fearless ones and
“Give me children ere I die,”
When “Dying is quite beyond the question, my dear,
Being as how wanton Aphrodite stole youth’s eternal fountain
right out Charmed Venus’ sweet hand.”
Is this all you have summoned me for Horatio?
Are there no more Minotaurs to slay?
No more scaly dragons to down with a single golden arrow from my bow,
nor even yet a serpent-headed Gorgon to decapitate?
If this is all there is, whereunto do the mighty of this age now fall?
Where shall I find an honourable death
within a world where rich men dine on paupers bones and drink the cellar dry?
The dragons are all gone, Horatio.
The valiant men have fallen into squabbling,
dicing for pretty rocks and beads
while all about
the unprotected die of hopelessness.
*****
Where else but here could it have ended?
On sea washed golden sands under a waning evening sun, you say?
Beside a gurgling brook within the forest glades of soothing reassurance?
Or better yet within the golden arms of lovers long betrothed.
Oh, to reincarnate just to lie within those golden arms
and never to have heard the summons of the un-behoving.
Close your loins Horatio!
Postpone my summons yet awhile.
For I will not tread wrath’s vintage
in this pestiferous cesspit
you call the Age of Reason.
Call upon me once again when you are ready to reclaim your rotted world
and surely I will heed.
Together we will wash away the tears of wasted generations
who only ever yearned to rise on shining wings of hope.
Those admirable ghosts of lingering deities
still summon me to court
where Justice, long unblinded,
has cast aside her scaly weights
to rant affronted aphorisms
into the faces of the
whoknowswho.
Bur for this time such pens as mine are broken swords,
gestalts unchained, exhortations vilified, that sever nothing.
The clocks are running backwards, Horatio,
the superstrings unwind
and your world is falling,
falling,
spinning,
turning,
down into the vortex
of the unforgiving
Neversphere.
Michael Forester
Tenerife
October 2013