I am no semi-god. Not even thirty, and already
my shoulders ache. Achilles brags
about his descent from Zeus, his mother
the nymph. Meanwhile,
I watch the bastard
trample over scatterbrained heads,
his feet boulders in a bloody flood.
Like a bird dying in a cliff,
I have called down from the walls.
I have tried to settle this thing
in a reasonable way,
while crowds of Greeks taunted me,
yelled up at us that he fucks
twenty sheep in an evening.
“Zeus is good,” the morons at home keep saying.
Meanwhile, I wake half-dead
in my wife’s blue-cold arms,
light already screaming the news
that Achilles is waiting,
the earth groaned apart
by his clam-meat legs, his eyes
rolling in their sockets like animals,
his arms slaying rocks, earth, anything at all,
until our soldiers come, and his companions
can point him in the right direction.
“Zeus’ brat,” I yell in the temple.
The cowardly priests hide
while I poke at Zeus’ statue,
and speculate (at the top of my lungs)
that Achilles is a posthumous birth
conceived by Thetis while she straddled
Zeus’ corpse, pushed his dead meat
up into herself.
“His great-grandson,”
some idiot hisses, crouched behind an altar.
I run him through as a kindness:
no Greek will fuck him now.
This is it. I have been the knot
long enough. I put on my armor
for the last time,
say good bye to my son, my wife, my world,
go down and get it over with.
I am no river,
no brainless avalanche.
I am only a man
snuffed out by something
with all the intelligence
of a finger.
© 2000, 2012 Jody Azzouni