Augural Song
It’s like a retelling of the very same thing,
a lyric verse that just keeps on capturing
your imagination. Your sensations. Your feeling
that you know this Kevin Martens,
and yet you don’t. You’ve barely scratched the surface
of quadrillions of years of hurting, of devastation, of empyrean, terrifying loneliness—
in some millennia, it got easier, because there was no one else around to bear witness
to just how little of a human being remained.
And yet, the fighting and the dying continued to change
one’s own approach to the ‘Verse, and all it reminds you of, when you want to be singing
of a better life.
A quieter, far more normal fight:
a credit card, a condominium. A lack of challenge.
A wife.
Something that tells you that you are not broken,
and suggests that if you feel this way,
according to the rules that appear in your head each day,
then you are safe. Not beholden
to hell.
To the place where all the Kristang devils go
to tell their stories. Where those who know
everything about you compel you to say
I’m a sinner.
I’m a failure.
I actually have an ego
and that’s not a good thing.
No fucking person on this earth is a hero.
And I want to ask you if that’s actually something you believe in,
or just something you know
to be true.
Is it on principle?
Or is it something that you endlessly review
while the concert is in session?
The orchestra awaits your command, tiger-captain;
perhaps, it is time for a different direction.
Perhaps a melody that is actually free to be completely and totally hybridised,
an arrangement that is endlessly new.
Perhaps an elegy for days gone by?
Perhaps a future, finally being put to an unforgettable tune.