Archive 10/23/12 - (1)

 

   

Lance Armstrong

 

How would you like to engage your fate, face to face, ego to ego,

If some Biblical prophecy, Classical Greek oracle,

Deus ex machina descending from the frieze atop the Parthenon

 

Were to inform you, with sharp, feverish barbs of martyrless stigmata

Piercing the wrists and ankles of your psyche,

Crucifying its inextricable emotions, in a sadistic show of histrionics,

 

That you were to be the recipient, beneficiary, victim

Of existence-disappearance, identity-anonymity, mind-silence,

For having some tenaciously official force erase you from spacetime?

 

I'm not alluding to traditional death, defunction, quietus —

The agent of complete, unadulterated expungement, life-deletion —

Rather to the removal from history's slots, categories, parameters,

 

All because you had the hubristic temerity to defy truth,

The arrogant stupidity to believe that a potentially forgiving world

Would sit by and watch you blow glowing soap bubbles into the sky,

 

And expect them to float all the way to the sun and back,

Your prevarications riding safely in their gondola-baskets,

Buoying you to the status of universe-class champion, for eternity.

 

Can you imagine capturing the indefectible limelight of hero worship,

For a lustrous, glorious two and a half decades of insuperable adulation,

Only to awaken, one dreary a.m., under a bed of dead leaves,

 

In the guise of a thousand pages of testimonial damnations,

Sworn statements from ghosts, wraiths, phantoms who colluded with you,

In gaming the game, with undetectable potions, elixirs, embrocations,

Deluding those who were assigned to test for such deceptions,

Keep all the players honest, in their quests for immortality,

And discover that you'd been caught in your stark-naked disgrace?

 

Ah, in the flashes and thunderclaps of the vengeful gods,

You've been caught not quite dead to rights but alive to wrongs,

Held up to the light of night, to be seen for what you are: dark,

 

A black emptiness worming your way through a galaxy of dying stars,

A nonentity of dust motes fluttering toward oblivion's cluttered forever,

A tragic shadow of once was, a pathetic harbinger of won't be.

 

 

                     

10/23/12 - (1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 

 
   
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