The Golem's Tale

The Golem’s Tale

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night. ~William Blake

Such angel’s verse is not for me

neither child of the giving sun

nor full moon’s daughter,

just a beaten orphan of the forge

metal weed and seed

of a rusted flower,

a tongue of bronze

rung in a copper bell

without the

will to lie.

No celestial choir sang my birth,

a golem shaped to serve

an alien purpose. No voice

was raised in praise, no white bull bled;

just the pounding foundry’s song,

blows of the Lame Smith’s hammer

echoing, making a sulphur contract

with eternity, my mother’s milk

a stinking silver slurry

of oil and shopdust.

And so my mindless hands

took up the work, cogdriven

droid of a deadfall dream,

whose bright tears run, melted

from a sightless eye of chrome,

a thousand quicksilver drops

on oblivion's floor. Wire bends

where glass breaks; flesh passes. 
Time in maelstrom tides tries

the temper, yet steel abides.

All the virtues of

their faults were folded in me,

wrapped in some master’s plan

numb, bound and blind, slaved to

a scripted animation; never told

whether razor, plow or piston, needle, rule

or scissors, engine, wheel or

fulcrum, never knowing when

the crack will come

that stops the iron heart.

September 2011

(A Labor Day poem for all who've been signed to a sulphur contract to eternity.)

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
where I have the fun of hosting tonight. Come join us and bring your best. Link in will be live from now until midnight Wednesday.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Golem: "artificial man, automaton," 1897, from Heb. golem [Psalm cxxxix:16] "shapeless mass, embryo," from galam "he wrapped up, folded."Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper  

Hephaestus was the Greek god of smithing and metallurgy. He served the gods as blacksmith, and was lamed when he was thrown from Olympus by his mother Hera in a fit of pique.

Image: Golem, sculpture by Bryan Alexander Davis
By Bitterherbs1 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

In the City of Android Dreams

In the City of Android Dreams

Down the latticed steps checkered with emptiness

leaving pillared buildings replicated endlessly

to arrive at their multiplying clones

in a bleach boned City of one shape,

dappled with green sulphur light I walk,

on a pavement that moves beneath me like

an animal twitching in its sleep, irked by

the buzz of yellow hellbeams that pierce the fretwork stairs.

My feet obey and slide me downward

in the inexorable fashion of the rolling belt.

The factory of my life hums as I descend,

through a rain of tumbling forms, a good machine.

There is no whirr, no clank, as the guardian statues watch,

not even the comforting blanket of a  natural terror;

only the ponderous attractive white building

which is every building, opening its million mouths.

There is no end to the steps going down

and there is no end to going down them

into that greengold sulphurous heart

that long ago ceased to beat,

into the light that is a violation,

down, down to penetrate the

atom, to be a particle forever

trapped on a stair spiraling around

the silent maelstrom’s eye.

I ask the shadowed statues

the only question I can’t answer;

the words drop, falling planets

in a black well of void.

August 1987
revised 2011


Posted for  OneShootSunday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 



Image by Walter Parada
Mr. Parada's website