enkidu's epitaph

My friend, my brother,

my beloved, Gilgamesh,

where have our battles taken us?

What have we tried to inscribe

in the milestones we left to stand

for a gap that changed the more

we pursued to stuff it vainly

with taxidermic glories?

My heart has always been at your side,

and it grew fonder the more yours,

was crowned with the retrieved blessings

of forests and skies you have purified for all

to dream their dreams in our joined deeds.

Allow me now to exhale my memories,

in this bed of living flowers that bees

and butterflies veil with their resting wings,

for a silent vibration that might sustain

my voice to be hung in resonance to.

I was once unaware of the world pains

and with the gazelle I ran and played

as if its slender jumps were my own,

and in the river's mist I awoke and slept

as if there was no sweeter refreshment

than the dew offering its tore symmetry

to tie my limbs in rainbows geometries.

But then from the forms I trusted as one

emerged the harlot whose sensuous lines

surpassed in awe any balsam and scent

the gazelle and the mist and the river had;

it was nothing fleeber than my worthiest care

for nothing around me existed to carry harm.

Alas that I could have escaped the teaching

that love casts on the unprepared spirit,

when to be one is to remain a part in exclusion,

when the surface of the fruit bitten in ripeness

leads to the hidden depths of rottenness

where poison and decay strive for consumption.

I aroused to the stale revelation that corrupted

all other breezes I was breathed in;

the gazelles' limbs were strummed with fears

at the sight of my erectile walk

and the river’s mist did not reveal anymore

crystal springs to harbour rest in

but the lurking shadows that in the marshes

wait to snap their jaws and string their stings.

I became a limping shape that shivers

the more it pretends to stay erected

falling and stumbling in fragmented individuality

left to be suffering for the pleasures then held

beyond the reach of the completeness now lost,

.

My friend, my brother,

my beloved, Gilgamesh,

in the sparkling of your sun smitten smiles

I saw the scaffold of the resourceful nature

I once was with in the nothing that differentiated me,

before the stains of overpowering distances

left the burning scorn of outspent innocence.

I have followed you till I could

till our forging gestures molded

metals we crossed and subdued

to mingle vapours of heated clamours

that will murmur our fire on eardrums

the hell furnaces would never turn to steel.

Not you nor even all that I loved

can free the vision I have of loving,

from the wisdom found whence useless,

of future hopes remembered in the past,

beyond the materialization of impulses

inconsistent without the dreamed one

thus endless soaring in uninvested rage

to find on the deadening seal of necessity

the embrace of fading fertility forearms.

and I alone remain devoted to the vision

I once had of the harlot being one still

with the nature she banished me from

that we would have tiptoed with the leaves swiftness

toward the synchronous giving that sun and moon

offer to sustain the waves of materializing colours with.

The solitude that I seek desperately to retrieve

is not replaced by the land of bleeding humbaba,

nor by the distilled heavens of the tamed bull;

in all we have achieved I met those synergic sinews

shrieking in the friction of disentangling motion

to recoil in germinal moment preceding the choice

that removed me from all that was one,

and that with my fragmented nature

has become all the fragments in nature.

I tried too hard to rebind my naïve self

to the beams that light pours equally

but the flashes that our deeds reflected

was only of me trying harder and futilely

to recover the severed form that love

has thrown in the engulfing abys

of chaos divorced of solitude

The only deliver I hope for

                             is silence

hence all that I lived for stands for itself

reconciling the noises with the deeds

where the harlot-that-was-not stares

with the gazelle’s pure eyes and reflects

the night and morning mists as they all

blend in single motion to accept the love

as I have learned it in suffered joyfulness,

to be witnesses to my hanging happiness

as they fold into one form over my epitaph.