Tozzath
Pellucid pachyderms wade across
the purpling River Manjees
and Tozzath watches from the bank,
the seat of his maroon pantaloons soaked with mud,
his nostrils flaring with the fragrance of ombadalias,
whose lacey petals flutter
like the wings of long-dead butterflies,
bestirred by ghoulish breezes,
the colors bleeding from moribund antennae,
slim as a cat’s whispers
Tozzath casts his gaze into the river’s ripples,
where crocs lurk, awaiting unwary dreamers,
ready to snatch their phrenolic flotsam
in bejeweled jaws and shred it into despairing wisps
spiraling into slanted moonbeams
glimpsed from quiet rooms
with carelessly parted curtains
made from the silk of a once-noble lady’s sigh
Tozzath’s gaze plumbs into a palatial abode
atop the highest hill in Anakabrazan.
He climbs a slim tower
ringed by crenellated battlements,
pushing his essence through walls
of besooted sandstone,
recoiling briefly from the reeking opulence
of the pasha’s slumber chamber
Scents of licorice and sandalwood
and kershoolo rise from incense sticks,
and Tozzath wends his way through furnishings
of walnut and mahogany encarved
with likenesses of winged beasts,
and approaches a bed covered with
damask cushions filled with nightingale feathers
which sing nocturnal ballads
when tossed and turned upon
Tozzath eyes the furrows
in Pasha Doasdra’s troubled brow,
where seeds of doubt sprout like weeds,
nourished by a rain of ruminations.
Blue rivulets of dreamstuff run
down the pasha’s weary face,
lined with the memories of sixty sunsets,
and creased by a dozen more,
lost in moonless crevices
Doasdra’s neatly trimmed beard
belies the thicket of twisted briars in his brain,
entangled entropies cloaked in conscious canopy
as convoluted as the treacherous undergrowth
within the Night Woods of Shaddeshan
Tozzath strides forward, unafraid,
his mind encased within the
protective curling confines of a conch
snatched from a beach where the paw prints of
forgotten creatures imprint shiftless sands
drizzled through an hourglass of purest amber,
overturned by the hand of Time
Tozzath fights through the flora
and breaches the beach,
wading into waters
where sad thoughts settle like silt
in the somber depths
He follows the flow,
paying homage to a tributary,
and dries his very best,
as a dusty road commences
beneath an umber sky.
He sets his feet upon it,
his soles shod in slipshod sandals
He cuts across fallow, hallowed ground
and nears a farmhouse
where termites have made a
banquet hall of the boards
He steps onto the porch with catlike grace
and finds no door to knock upon.
He enters, stirring dust motes
caught in a sunbeam pouring through
a shingular aperture
Tozzath ascends rail-less steps,
heads down a hallway,
pauses, passes
through a closed door;
its piney panels tickle
A young girl blanketed by shadows
lies on a bed of rusty spirals
while her head squats in the corner,
covered with cobwebs.
A small spider splays in her open mouth.
The eye sockets serve as a hovel for fruit flies.
Her scalp is bare, the hair plucked long ago,
prized nesting material for birds,
none of them nightingales
The girl’s thin arm moves,
her bony fingers grasping an emerald
nestled in her cleavage,
attached to a scarlet ribbon
draped around her cloven neck.
She removes the priceless pendant
and places it in Tozzath’s palm,
cold as an unswaddled foundling
Tozzath leaves the shadow girl and
departs the farmhouse.
The baked clay beneath his feet
gives way to golden cobbles,
and buildings of alabaster and porcelain
rise on either side,
topped by bulbs and minarets
of finest moonstone
The grand markets of Anakabrazan
stretch before him,
bursting at the seams
with beggars and choosers,
merchants and mendicants,
overflowing with goods and bads.
The clamor rings in Tozzath’s ears,
mingling with nightingale songs
He spies two ragamuffins in an alley.
A boy picks up a piece of broken bottle
and turns to a disheveled girl,
draped in grimed homespun, not shadows,
her eyes bright as emeralds.
The boy entwines the bauble
and hangs it around her neck.
She kisses his cheek,
leaving a smirk and a smudge
Tozzath watches sadly as a
wagon heaped high with melons
rounds a corner,
the driver cracking a whip
over hunchbacked horses.
A melon falls from the back and
instantly a dozen urchins descend,
their ears attuned to the sound of falling fruit.
Their dinner chime.
The boy and girl dash out of the alley.
The boy steps in mongrel dung.
He slips and falls,
sliding beneath the clattering wheels.
His head splits open like a melon
and the girl screams.
Somewhere, a mongrel mourns
And in a silken bed in a marbled manse
on the higher side of town,
a noblewoman cries out also
as the slippery head of a newborn pasha
erupts from her womb.
The odd indentations in his skull
will fade in time
In another alley the grimy girl stoops,
prying up paving stones,
clutching them to her heart.
She’ll hurl them at the melon merchant
next time he passes by
A crowd gathers in a courtyard
outside the army barracks
and watches a soldier’s scimitar
seek out the girl’s slim neck,
sending her soul to the shadows
Tozzath returns to the farmhouse
where shades of meaning await the womb.
The girl still tarries, tallying,
carping about unkind cuts,
refusing her rebirth
But an old man, swaddled in silks,
shall soon depart his bed,
and recall the emeralds he made
from broken bottles
before he ever was
And the boy shall come to the farmhouse,
cleansed by the rains of remembrance,
no longer confined to the prism
of Fate’s fractals,
and the two fast friends shall ride
a kinder conveyance,
with bespokened wheels encircling eternity
And they shall quaff dregless brews
from green, unbroken bottles
Copyright © Stanley Carter | Year Posted 2016
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