Daffodils (And Other Things She Allows)

Half the words that shine from her lips are false. 

They’re lies she uses to twist people 

around, make them think 

she likes them. 

Make them think she understands 

them, deeply, in ways they cannot

understand themselves. 

She doesn’t understand 

the world doesn’t always fall 

At her tipping of the globe that resides

in the old study, in the history hall

where she speaks of Friedrich Nietzsche 

In 

Every 

Lecture

Like she’s read Zarthusrtra. She 

Doesn’t even understand him

because she is, in her mind only,

The Ubermench who carefully grooms her sheep

— then, like the Savior 

Possessed by Wormwood

sends them to slaughter.

The ones she holds dear always hold her dearer.

She caresses, and she kisses their lips and scraped knees

But they’ll kiss her feet

And she will stand tall, looking down upon them from 

Atlas’s mountain

And when she says it is her duty to carry the world,

the ones she love,

who love her more than she loves them,

Beg to carry it for her.

And she allows it. 

She will not allow the world to spin without her. 

But she will not allow the world to crumble 

At her hand

At the hand of her enemies

(At her hand)

Crumble like the dust of time sparkling, fading, whisked away

in whispers croaked by the clockwork father.

Like those who love her,

she feels a duty to her art

because she feels a duty to her universe

To create.

To leave the earth with something it did not have before.

She will leave her memory earth

not to be known as one who shattered empires 

in order to craft her own, but 

Rather as one who buried her work with the grass of 

Her people. 

Her people, to whom she speaks 

with words like daffodils — not grocery store bouquets, 

but sun-kissed flowers all the same.

Her lips tremble

afraid that she will speak out of her turn

Of the sun.

Afraid she will mistakingly say the thing that will send them 

Careening to the center of the earth

as if by hiding from the heavens 

and reaching the iron core, they can 

Recenter themselves on their own axis. 

She cannot save them from all the way down there,

as much as she may wish she could;

she has no duty to those who feel no duty to their art.

She has a duty to the stars

For she has sacrificed her mind and soul to the muses

so that they may inspire the universe

and give humanity a poem 

For which it is worth surviving.