I trace my steps through labyrinthine streets,
My veil the cloak of Alagaddan night.
With no companion but my cold heartbeats,
I check my hands for some imagined blight.
The Lord is quite exacting, you will see.
No blemishes for our good Lord-in-White.
I stride ‘cross flagstones of pale filigree,
O’er shining plates and ice-cold marble works,
To-ward that great and terrible white tree,
The place where words draw morningstars and dirks.
A final chance to plead my humble case
Against the Lord and his sedulous clerks.
In ev’ry bough a crying human face
Condemned without a mask or dignity,
My fate if I do not escape disgrace.
I stand beside the Herald Amity,
And her dread clarion sounds out my name,
“Horatio, speak now in polity.”
“My virtue I endeavor to reclaim,
I plead, repeal the choices made in haste
And rid a man of undeservèd blame.”
“I fear thy awful sentence is misplaced,
For not one man can survive without love,
And all of us bear intellect unchaste.”
I speak to great Ionocles above,
And peer at the holes in his blank white mask
To gauge his beating heart or lack thereof.
He says to me “You swore your solemn task
Was to unchain yourself from idle mind,
And yet, in spite, you for our mercy ask?”
Say I, “To work oneself so dull and blind
Is no good work for honest men to bear.
These efforts shrewd men in steel shackles bind.”
I kneel beneath those branches, pale and fair,
Those which blot out my soul in umbral dread,
And hang above my skull like maidens’ hair.
The prosecutor says “He’s made his bed!
He flouts your highest law; you must convict!”
But nay, my liege bids his shrill voice go dead.
If my remarks to heart great wounds inflict,
I may yet see to-morrow’s twin sunrise.
The Lord may well my sentence interdict.
His Grace beholds my pate and hears my cries.
“You claim you must sustain yourself on love,
And find your solace ‘tween a woman’s thighs?”
“A solace can yet be a silver dove,
Or wine or gold or any sort of thing.
A vice to fit each man like his own glove.”
“I see you bear a lambent platinum ring.
Without it, would you nearly work as well?
Each flame his fuel, from commoner to king.”
My tongue is silver gilt, my wit a spell,
My words a rapier’s edge to pierce the heart.
For my opponents’ case, a solemn knell.
The prosecution rises with a start,
An argument forming on sneering lips,
But lo, the Lord from their counsèl depart!
I brace myself for words that lash like whips
But he does naught but look me in the eye
And my left flank his wizened white hand grips.
“My Lord, is it my fate to live or die?”
I ask of him and plead for clemency.
“You’ve brains, young bird, your wits your freedom buy.”
They curse my name but set my bright soul free.
But, one last thing before I leave the floor,
I pick a silver shroom from ‘neath the tree.
A sov’reign wonder for my paramour.