Myth's Mules

How well did the heavens know the earth

When there were demigods around?

Not so many as to run into one at the market thrice a week

But plenty of talk about them and their implausible beauty

Would circulate, sparkling, through the market all the time

Their casual elegance and intimidating skills

A direct line to the funding, not its recipients

Indifference to disease and decay and the embarrassing consequences

Of being just another body among bodies, born below and bound there to remain

With plastic explosives of misery

Just waiting in every, ticking cell

To remind you that you're made of dust and that you will bite it

Aloof, magnetic in that way that only immunity to need generates

"You poor animals," they seem to say, with every smile and single bound

"I am not made of your crude forms alone, oh no,

I'm made of finer things!"

You can't even reach the shelf my mother sits on

My father has power over the sea, and your great claim to fame is boating

For food, for sport, for conquest and desperate, barbaric violence

You should be careful with your thoughts and words and deeds while I'm around

Sure, they'd do something impossible now and again, just for the press

But they must have been terrifying company at dinner

Still

They were living proof

Heaven was inhabited by beings who find us so interesting and amusing

So pitiful in our struggles and so ecstatic at our every, microscopic victory

That children were born of the mingling of heavenly beings and earthly beings

Where's your messiah now?

How well did the earth know the heavens

When there were demigods around?

Intimately

Fruitfully

Things went pear shaped all of the time, of course

Rape is the most terrible crime a victim can survive

Imagine if the perpetrator

Took the form of a swan, or a cloud, or a golden shower

Of coins

Imagine trying to testify

Under such preposterous, delirious conditions

To be violated and then dismissed as mad

When you seek justice following the crime

"I was assaulted by a gorgeous buffalo!"

Casualty of the cosmic class war

Smoked and then crushed out by an untouchable hand

Imagine how eloquent your rage would make you

Prophets talk like that

They insist upon change before it is too late

Shouting in temples and on buses and streetcorners

Waiting for a real hero to set things right

Surrounded by myth's mules

Heaven has very few earthly children, these days

Myths change some of us, sure

But most are impervious to their charms

Only one thing shapes who they are

The screen

Carefully calibrated to supply whatever is demanded

Without ever tasting the demand

Or questioning its quality

Everything is boring at birth

Everything is a fake, a gimmick, a joke, a con

Everything is made to part fools from their money

Just enjoy it

Don't overthink it

Get lost in its hot cheeto hyperpalatability

Don't worry about the extraterrestrial iridescence

Of that dust coating your fingers and your mouth

Just keep shoving it past your worries and doubts

Into the ravenous, malnourished opening

You're no demigod

All of this will end badly some, grey Wednesday

We are all at the funeral

Of casual chatting in the elevator

Even that espresso shot of awkward boredom

In the presence of mostly harmless strangers

Is no longer palatable

People draw their devices like Wyatt Earp

The better to gun down the threat

Of casual acquaintances made

Of one's neighbors

They fuck with us, the mediocre blinking myths we're shown

But nothing comes of it but our gold, lifted heavenward, vanishing

We are not given the components of new gods

Instructions included

Any more

We must make them

From scratch