Re: Ozymandias

Like ants they scurry, hurry
From task to thorax breaking task
For the greater grander project yet
The deified monument defined

Mote by time defying mote
Broken from ancient boulders
Classic sculpture, castle stones
And the crack gravel of modernity

See, king of kings, see
Your wind-swept sands still seething
With white-golden glimmering fires
Foot flesh searing that we dance

Hear, ear-lending citizens
Together fear and set ourselves
Upon the unfriendly formica
As we make ourselves master this yard

Our queen, who grants to us liberty,
Shines a light upon the world
Invites us all to the sumptuous banquet
Of freedom, prosperity, and justice

Brigands boast not here
Else the righteous sword dispatch your ear
Whilst we in fertile gardens play
Sole recipients of sunly ray

Be not nautical aerial aetherial
Venture not vertical
To heights and depths unmanned
To space outside our plan

For we’ll know, we always do
Your infamy, your treachery
Against the mother, against your birth
Against the father, your nation’s earth

Forgive me and forget me
You aim to touch the sky
Above us high, stay one
Stay one with us of dirt

One day your wax will burn away
One day you’ll plummet straight
Shooting cross the aether flame
Your doom marks us all, omen

The blame will not be shared then
But ‘scaped by us, you goat
Bray boastful still you will
As we ‘dorn a pike your head

We are not totem brothers
Matched in sin and patricidal shame
Nay, yours is the hubris
Yours is the great cosmic wrong

Can you blame the scorned?
Who toil and drudge
That your roads are clean
And your autos pristine

Thanklessness ever exceeding
The dreams they dreamt as children
Now but rudely mocked
In pale-screened imitations

Is this not a tale told in common
The king with his people
As greedy, better men despoil
The roguish baron’s play

But now the ancient pact is broken
And Rome’s sword buried deep within her guts

What a rich and luscious heritage
So nutrient filled
So quenching to the thirst
Autohemabibology, the new science of self-consumption

Still they doubt us, those family men
From the caves to the plains
Under the banners of the fathers
And so new cities made

When the binding twine was still soft
Stretched sinews and pig guts
Fat burning words divining
By the rites we came to know

Gods, heroes, men design
Names for stories told by fire
That promethean gift and curse
By which the world will rise and burn

To survive we must dig
Dig deeper, ‘neath the blood and the guts
‘Neath the bones and the catacombs
‘Neath the fossils of fearsome myths

Dig deeper and hide
Dig deeper where the devils reside
And take up refuge there
At least we’ve earned our share

Though they no trumpets blare
No pearly gates, no virtues rare
But the vulgar common mass
Rapt caged in tarnished brass

As this will be to us to keep
As this will be, so as I speak
Pretense no truer ever else
And this will end authentic selves

So let us build our castles, mote by mote
The days at least by this be kept
And when the dusk long shadows turn
Let our brutal tales, under rug be swept