*****
I strung my kite and licked my thumb and bid farewell
to this cruel world, to all of you… You bastards!
I blew a kiss to my poor old weeping mum,
every bit the clown, her makeup a sordid mess.
I tossed a pinch of dust, a blade of grass
and watched them waft this way and that.
North by North-West, more or less…
I rode zephyrs to the far corner of a cirrus field,
somewhere between the endless sky and the open sea,
between the void and a planet with too much gravity.
I learned a lot from my attempted suicide:
I learned some winds are vertical,
I learned some miles are nautical,
I learned you can never trust a Cherub
holding a crystal tumbler of what looks like Mezcal.
Rock-climbing the ice-wall of a cumulonimbus,
I punched through cotton and found the Gods.
I watched them milling there, living there,
bickering with their God-wives and God-kids,
playing with their bisexual lovers and mythical pets.
I found a Pantheon of crass, self-serving politics
and I learned that we learned from the best:
the Gods, too, are into some sordid shit.
I found a Pantheon of incest and infanticide,
stone-faced betrayals and rabid, frothing bacchanals.
I found hubris and jealousy and the kind of pornography
that no human was ever destined to see.
And I learned some children are ungrateful,
I learned some parents are neglectful,
I learned you can never trust a Nymph
holding the beating heart of a mortal.
The Cherub, that knowing bartender, beckoned.
And so, overcome with clarity I took that fated drink
and skulled it hard enough to kill a winged horse.
And lo! the Gods grew tiny as I tumbled down
the mountainside of our mythologies:
the Hindu, the Hopi Wuya, the Yoruba, the Norse…
I woke up flat on my back in my own backyard
holding a crystal tumbler and a severed kite string,
watching my mother wail and cry and ululate
in praise to the Gods.
Yann Rousselot 
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