Α · Petasus
β
               Carrying a lightness that runs
counter to the weight of his life,
tiptoeing with futile finesse
and feigned strength through brazen hoops of
               fiery whelps undoing belts
γ
               of breath with lips parting sheets of
heat, sandaled feet like a spinning
dial of rising suns burning
laps through the ferocity of
               barbed wire’s stars and stripes, scars and scrapes
δ
               hanging flags on knees ill-prepared
to pray, he makes his way, baring
down on gravel teeth of gas-lit
infantry-bitten streets, wounded
               and fugitive on wingèd feet
ε
               and in a flighty cap cocked to
the right, he marathons through night
past cruciform streetlights from which
hang multilingual signs warning
               against mistaking for all that
ζ
               exclusive right of kings to ask
for and get eternal life, past
prisons of short sentences he
headlines to the campsite where our
               victims are concentrated, bruised
η
               and bloodied as squeezed, gutter-strewn
oranges stewing in their own
juices, those of us pampered by
products of progress, illusions
               of flawless love enticing us
θ
               to live orchestrated lives in
concert with messages moving
too fast from fluent flashes of
incongruous languages to
               a blurred inaction of fact, fags
ι
               resisting no one’s attack, legs
crippled and convicted by our
conviction to the unscripted
truth of doing what moves us to
               make do instead, and in spite, of
κ
               being imprisoned by maudlin
lies others tell us about our
Selves, soft feathers fall from his cap,
a Phrygian sock filled with hard
               pennies of dreadful thoughts it drops
λ
               off to make room for their bullets,
a wound of a room whose purview
it is to deliver sweating
disaster faster than cracked-glass
               competitors who courier
μ
               too, but not as well, in danger’s
rapturous package of worse
damages than that messenger
shooting up addicts to pain for
               whom traumatics is another

                                        Ω · Talaria
ν
               name for thaumaturgy, the poor
man’s drama of urging the gods
for another state of being,
another stage on which to play
               out the mock-heroic mythos
ξ
               of mortals believing hard in
the magic of ignoring words
already over-performed by
doctors, metaphysicians who
               harm anyone who listens to
ο
               vaguer retellings of arrows
sent down by heaven, selling bad
medicine, vulgarizing how
the heroin angered them once
               into taking up rusted nails
π
               as rebels do fatal causes,
failed arsenals of substances
vanquishing substance in a war
for peace no one ought to have fought
               in, on drugs and forewarned, Hermes
ρ
               greets his captors as actors do
their directors, asking if he
should look into the camera
or remind audiences to
               not yet tear down that fourth wall, if
σ
               he should deliver his as if
the lines were more than lies of lead
scrawled like tarnished vines winding panes
inside the stained glass of his skull,
               a head filled with particles of
τ
               responses too small to recall,
infinitesimal minutes
of dust time has taken into
its rustling web, mistrusting his
               balls’ instinct he follows them all
υ
               into the aching chamber where
oracles retire, reticent
and servile, echoes reclining
on otherwise silent or long
               ago silenced hospital beds
φ
               wailing now under the ‘Wait!’ of
crumbling statues of heroes who
have fallen, here Trismegistus
receives the call, answers without
               stalling at all to a fate none
χ
               of the other prisoners or
their jailers have the charisma
to go up against, the message
itself one which addresses him
               as Apollo with a mouthful
ψ
               of marbles, spilling cartridges
of Mercury, knowing only
he can portend what end follows,
release fully from the filthy
               claws of his father’s memory.