A fresh miasma under Little Lake;
A green spirit riding a drake,
Follow me, follow me,
Cries the beast.
A golden light seen beneath –
A forest pilfered with slimy leaves;
Follow me, follow me
Through these trees.
He stood before me,
As I fell into the deep.
Small impish and green
His voice is velvet
And He stands on cloven feet.
His head is crowned
In antler, ivory suckled with beat
Gold, and pissing madly,
He stands on cloven feet,
He stands on the drake’s back.
Come ride with me
He seems to say;
He tries to say;
He says too little then says too much
But none of it is heard anyway.
Cold yet green He slides
Down the sink hole,
Down into the wonderland
Of deepness, without a seat.
He asks,
Would you like a star
To hold in your heart:
Golden orange fire burning
In passions, in pantomime,
And lasting till it
Burns your heart,
Burning, till ash meets ash.
No? You don’t want that?
How ‘bout a kiss from
A boy with cloven feet?
Such sweet kisses he gives,
Just ask your parents and friends
And priests and murderers
And beasts.
They all know, but won’t it,
Repeat that heat they feel.
The kiss from the Boy with cloven
Feet is tricky,
It’s dangerous to those who
Read the Word, the old and new,
Because they’re ignorant,
They don’t know what to fear,
How to fight, to recognize
When hell has burst
From the virgin’s womb
In a bloody, steaming mess
And left us, all the rest,
In the footholds of a painful death.
He pushes—he wants to prod.
He speaks of white faces, red soldiers, black priests,
And grey, grey horses
And says they don’t exist.
Child’s warble, he says,
With velvet dripping callous.
His lips are parted—he holds me
Down,
He wants to taste
The root, and all that’s base;
Come, come ride, he laughs,
Dancing on his cloven feet,
Green and clicking and swelling
Like a tree—into a man, into a beast.
Come, Come, the baritone beckons.
His lips are saccharine and law,
I cannot resist, this Man with cloven feet.
By Nicholas Azzopardi