Hunter Hansen - Iliam

As my body, pierced, stripped and bleeding
Dragged on a circuit around my walled city
Of indefatigable resolve
I lay wounded, dying, hurried
My fall is marked in red tracks surrounding
My wall of what was once safety
Safety in apathy; I willfully abandoned.

Not a long leap, yet still I fall
As the chariot drives on in a rage
The crippled maw it carries raking the stony ground
Clearing it of the jagged pebbles,
Absorbing the bitterly hot sand
Caking my wounds, but never salving
My anguish, my longing…slow down…

Oh, sweet chariot, carry me no further
Let me sleep, forever let me sleep
Whether I want my emptiness or
My fulfillment, my tendons tattered, flesh flayed
I disgrace the ground upon which I ski;
The waves of granite, crusted bloody stone.

Around again, we go, the chariot I drive.
From the city I watch in tears.
Dragged by the pounding iron carriage
I endure only to taste every last dropp of pain.
Whipped around a small stone monument
My skull, already fractured, once again splits
In greeting, and my back,
Plenteously laced with scars from whip and blade
Undergoes the rubble’s tumultuous massage,
And the trail of red begins to deepen as
Faster goes the chariot.

Stampeding onward, no matter how far stretched, the life still
Remains in my veins, even as they flow freely in rebellion
To this utter disgrace; could not I have been shamed in death
Rather than to my death? …I feel my heart already breaking,
Spilling, the first to go, a love sustaining that somehow
Slayed me, my city, soon to go in flames; it was love that
Cast me out, love that drives the chariot, love that drags me
Around and around and around and around again,
But it’s because of love I find myself still alive…

Hunter Hansen

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/iliam/