Vision of a Mad King
I am Saul, beset, besieged, afraid to face the war
Without the latent singing of my natal star
Exposed. Fiends and witches medium know alone
To bring up a spirit or read the scattered bone
But those dark, heinous hags are no more
With venom wrath I slaughtered and purged them
And still find no praise in the silence of my core
From him who first hated them ... no ah nor em.
I am Saul, speak to your king, is any left
To compose me, I now of old Samuel bereft
Can find no spark of God or light abroad
Endor is far, the trek is hard, trek is hard.
One witch is there, you are sure? One for me
To consult and consort and be forgiven
One to tell aught of promise or pallid tragedy
How stands my course between hell or heaven?
At dead of night, the deadly still becalms the world
And I am cloaked darkest rags and identity curled
Catlike within, laden with ritual wage I venture forth
To convent with awful hag, and make my fickle sport
And then a hollow voice was heard, a distant chilling
Echo, with edges icily dripping in the dark of my heart
The witch of Endor like a foggy figure, rising and nearing
The leaves and all things normal fled, or moved apart.
Then out of the cavernous depths of earth
I Saul saw, like entrails from a flimsy sow at birth
The form, the icy apparition that soon became
Exactly as the figure of he as Samuel named
Looming me with frightening spite to the end
The sword twisted, gut wrenched, headless time
Mark how the judgment my soul have rend
Mark me shivering in the alien, cold, callous clime.
What thing is this, what dreadful horror to my eyes
Seditious vampire, treason is the altar of reason's lies
Yet nothing shakes me cold unless the force is real
The apparition came and went and my fate was sealed.
And I Saul, king, who heard the dead groaned before
A thousand cruel ways upon a bloody floor, aghast
Beheld what had no explanation in temple or shore
Sin's perdition entangled me from a calamitous past.
Copyright © L'Nass Shango | Year Posted 2009
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