Hortus, a suburban devil of Pandemonium,
Is lonely tonight for want of a loyal friend:
Anyone, sick or foul, human or fiend,
Even a specter enriched with plutonium.
The lights glare like angry souls at the palace,
And the burning rivers between here and there
Drown out the sweet, anguished tintamarre
Of endless victims of his own so-called malice.
Cold comfort for Hortus, who once boasted
The brightest shield and the longest spear,
Who stalked the palace halls without fear,
Now to stand out here, alone and untoasted.
"Curse you all!" he cries, "I don't deserve this!"
But knows there's no leaving Satan's service.
Their hero made sentences not drawings
With crayons and one day broke in half
Eighty-eight in the box (for no reason),
Leaving little pieces for the cawings
He scribbled so his friends might read and laugh.
No judge would banish him for this treason.
He built a tower to gild his language,
Then praised their god when his hate made them spit
At words others spoke and rip up the page
They'd written, substituting bullshit.
The tower still stands, rotting and silent,
But for the greatest of men who scribbles
On a clapper-less bell senseless dribble.
Asleep, he mumbles alone in his tent.
One hundred and four years ago
He diagnosed our vertigo.
His scalpel cut beneath the skin
And removed original sin.
He held it in his palsied hands —
The nothing he left on Margate Sands.
It’s only gotten worse since then —
The commandments are ten times ten.
Dust is fear and the unreal real.
Now it’s not what you think, but feel.
A cacophony of voices
Warns us to forget all choices.
As night falls a whimpered prayer
Confuses the canting slayer.
There’s one bastard that Death doesn't yet want --
A man He's content to smilingly haunt,
To assure that he hasn't forgotten
What comes. "Maybe when your mind's most rotten,"
He whispers from behind the sickroom door.
The man, a murdering conquistador,
And raper of the widows of the poor,
Cut a priest's throat to settle an old score,
And sold babies to feed a king's prize boar.
Delectable crimes for Death -- no reason
Not to take this human in his season.
His disgust is with the miser's grasping
Love of Death’s own hot and eternal sting.
