Poem: ‘Dance of Life’

This was long thought to be the only portrait ...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Don’t hold out a torch
for me, I am not free of blame. This

is the dance of life where all are
culpable, soon to be drowned in

washes, the mangling gears
of pain. But who knows, these maelstroms

might be wormholes, revealing other
worlds and tableaux of night; dressings

of props across cold stone walls, taken
and rebuilt from dishevelled remains.

And where bards once played on stages,
hidden behind arras stitchings

and nom de plumes, we are all still
mere punters in pits macabre, holding

torches for celebrity – look at them, drunk,
high up with their gods of gold

© poem copyright David F. Barker 2013

Flesh of the Gods

All Giza Pyramids in one shot. Русский: Все пи...
All Giza Pyramids in one shot. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” Matthew 13:12

His wish was for eternity, flesh
of the sun to mask his corruption; yet
he got his wish the instant Carter’s
torch shone through that chiseled hole: An afterlife
lived only through posterity, outshining
his ignominious end, all
made possible by legions of lackeys who worked
and then died.
Fast forward the centuries
and see little has changed, though
the flesh of the gods
is in bars, hidden in vaults underground, never
seen— like the hopes and dreams of peace,
these rigged scales of elusive justice. We are
left to scrap and save what we can
in a manufactured, finite
world, this theatre underfoot
none like us shall inherit. There is, after all,
only one sun in the sky
and Osiris lies in pieces, unable
to be mended again

© copyright Davidi F. Barker 2012