Death of Sardanapalus

La mort de Sardanapalus by Eugene Delacroix

Indulgent King, seeker of pleasure
Presiding over another night’s sport
Watches passively impassive
All the delectable devastations writhe and whinny
Lamentations, death screams, amid gurgles, last breaths
What he loved best and collected as treasure
Horses and concubines – in that order
Unbound sumptuousness, heady ecstasy
Completing his dominion of flesh and fleshly inclinations
With one word to ruin them all in an orgy of blood
By the hands of obedient slaves
Soon to join the squirming pile
Along with their King in funereal fire.

War lost, all lost, culminating in this moment
Extravagances former sweetness
Smothered and smoldering with gory finality
The riches of Nineveh and Assyria lost forever
Anguished bone fragments revived by Byron’s pen and Delacroix’s brush
Recreated in wax at Ripley’s Wax Museum in Time’s Square.

I saw it as a child not knowing the story
Not caring what the truth was
As I stood transfixed and horrified at the sight
Of brutalized women and horses – in that order
While a man watched as lives were ripped away from them
Without a hint of humanity
Or remorse.
I knew this man and his awful gaze
How he created home grown atrocities
Dripping from drunken lips and
Steel mill burnt roughened hands that wrenched
Childhood from its core
I stumbled like a brutalized beast
Resilient as dried blood
My King, Father did not join me in burning embers
Though he burnt in personal hells and damnations
I climbed free over my own broken bones.

I kept coming back to those awful waxed figures
No matter how many times my mother tried to force me away
I knew the scene too well
To leave them
Just yet.
Like Alice through the looking glass
I recognized myself staring back through waxen orbs
Knife blade through childhood’s chest
Except there would be no painting or poem
To bring back what was lost from the ashes
To immortalize the one who survived
Kingly decrees and orders
Me.