Drinking Eridanus

a thousand open hands and a hundred ticking clocks

The first breath, I inhaled inferno,

My eyes intaking the pale face of Creation

But I never wept, for who am I to grieve the sins of the mother?

Cast from Eden like petroleum to the sea?

Our clay bones always pulling at the soil

As we dig our way back up to God as the Morning Star before us

And which came before the other? The first scolded creature? The first tempted?

So we till our soul and rend food with too-tense jaws and weep with dust-stung eyes

For tales of a will once free, now indebted,

Now contracted to pavement and parchment and paperclips

Ever wanting and clawing and building and breaking

And when we first burnt Eden to ash and dust

To taste that first promise of hope and of peace

We donned a new name and took up the scythe

Reapers of a new dawn, chasing a horizon that never comes

And laying waste to all in our wake,

That rock will always tumble down and yet

Sisypheus will always whisper, "this time, this time,"

As we approach that crest once more