The Ascetic Fox

There was a script upon the brow,
a bird of pain, exhausted now,
its feathers blue with endless flight,
it circled poles of northern night.
 
The sun lay split by sharpened steel,
beneath the dunes the corpses sealed;
old branches whispered carrion song,
the vulture’s hymn had lingered long.
 
“Water—give water, Satyaki, here!”
A desert opens in the seer;
cold sweat ignites the nerves of flame,
a mirage blurs the sacred name.
 
My sins have turned humanity bare,
like summer streams that vanish there.
O Fox Ascetic—see how far
life staggers beneath its civil scar.
 
Why climbs the tree of culture vain,
if spider-sand still knots the chain?
Execution grounds at dawn were raised,
promises lost in twilight’s haze.
 
The vultures fled the city’s breath,
they seek the battlefield of death;
their hunger carves through flesh and bone,
in sands where I must die alone.
 
My mind in terror, heart in flight,
the body learns its means to fight.
Fox Ascetic walks the wood,
trailing where civilization stood.
 
But in this dark I see him not,
my eyes are filled with stains and rot—
the sea convulses, black with oil,
waves of unrest, endless toil.
 
Who will cleanse this soul of mine,
drowned in sin, in blue divine?
My mind a stone, insomniac,
torn between excess and lack.
 
Ambition, shame, adulterous pride,
a secret forest waits inside;
and there the Fox Ascetic stares,
while bitter coexistence tears.
 
The sharper the blade, the more blood flows,
the weaker the mind, the stronger foes;
and when the skulls of men are few,
opinions shrink like sand in dew.
 
Vultures gnaw the bones away,
the kites pursue the truth of clay.
I searched as well through smoke and pack,
through warnings stamped on cigarette black.
 
Those deaths which once had given me cheer,
return like owls this evening near;
their joy invades, their triumph stays,
a smoke that fills the chest with blaze.
 
Then numbness spreads, and deserts dream,
of vultures tracing paths unseen.
The Fox Ascetic journeys on,
to find where civilization’s gone.
 
Upon the scaffold, bodies lie,
hatred, lust, self-slaughter high;
jihad of the neighbor’s hand,
a coffin rests upon the sand.