Icarus's Warning
Art by Katie Babson
They never told you about how
Icarus laughed as he plummeted,
beneath the gleaming pearly-hot Sun,
a mouth full of canine teeth.
It was a mournful cry that rang out,
drowned by the billowing wind’s oppression.
he was tragic and strange and beautiful as he fell,
wearing oily wings that waned over his Sun-blistered shoulders;
dripping down his thighs like waxy tears,
white as the peeled skin of stars.
dimly aware of the howling wind that
plucked his feathers blue
and pinched his red face.
a true hanged man.
The razor-sharp heat was suffocating,
his wings: scorching fire and grease;
industrial smoke spewed from his throat.
the consequences for his:
polluted speeches,
bloated arrogance,
all-consuming hunger.
too blind to realize his fatal flaw:
wearing oily wings that waned over his Sun-blistered shoulders;
a failed lost saint.
Even the pink-tinted dawn pitied the folly of the hanged man,
as it groaned under the heaving weight of
carbon imperial thrones
and iron-forged pillars.
Atlas shuddered from ambition,
it smelled of gold and lightning.
a misbegotten man.
But Icarus plunged towards the restless sea.
it glared like a glittering diamond,
almost as brilliant as the Sun.
but his mouth ached with desire for corporate-sponsored
illusions of petroleum and consumerism.
a massacre orchestrated by
the all-consuming ambition of economic
g
o
d
s.
His smog-induced raison d’etre suffocated taxonomic Kingdoms,
attempting to justify ultraviolet swathed midsummers
that hid vacant and molten lies
– he stares up once more,
There are twice as many stars.
a silent whimper.