Gladiator

I swam the river Styx and fed the beast,
Mowed the Elysian Fields and poisoned Bacchus’ feast.
No fountain grave for my virgin girdle,
No divine wrath to make the milk curdle.

My warrior blood- the carpet beneath your feet,
My forced agony where demented society and mind meet.
Must I use the silk on which royal perspiration lain,
To wipe my sweat from the windowpane?

Born of cream sweetness from mother’s breast,
For the gladiator, too, does the sun yawn in the west.
You wipe your filthy troubles on my wedding bed,
Take my shoes for beneath your enemy’s head.

If I carried words on a gilded plate
For ghosts to swoon and adulate,
And feel yellow blood pulsing once more
Through civilization’s core.

If I sat each night on gem-encrusted throne
In corrupt darkness where no sun doth shone,
Drinking goblets of undecided wine-
Dubious from nearsighted hands benign.

I pity you, whose words quench the rain,
Whose jewels- products of anguish and disdain.
Dreams infected with apparitions of poor decree
And contaminated love that will no longer be.

I am no more than fear for your child,
A creature sullied with birthright reviled.
You see the difference between gold and tin,
I see metals and the ability to imagine.