Post by goldenmyst on Jun 18, 2022 20:01:18 GMT -6
Aztec Sacrifice
His masters tell him, “Don’t lock gaze with feminine eyes. The pit of fire lies deep and hungry like an eclipsed sun whose darkness drives both human and animal mad with black crystal visions to blind the male with the smoking coals of night.”
And the palace of his childhood dreams shakes with earthquakes from unseen fault lines of the fairer sex. Prepubescent lesson one is that female felicitation of form and gravity is evanescent as the morning mist before a summer’s day. Soft curves slope into the pits of depravity from which there is no escape. The plumed serpent is a jealous lover who owns your heart like an ancient fable. Do not awaken his hunger lest you bring ruin to the kingdom.
Like a fox on the run from dogs, he was hounded by the notion that this smear of women was a ploy to keep him out of the imperial harem and true to his virginal destiny. But like the fox, he knew how to evade the masters of his fate and find the hidden boudoirs where freedom lay in the arms of a courtesan.
So he drinks from the cup of fate with both his flutes the one he blows with his breath and the one brought to the cusp by his hand. In moments when his clouds of uncertainty part he considers that the two instruments of his passion, below and above, will not sustain his reluctant celibacy. In the evening as swallows warble in the eaves he will invite the maid in for more than a dusting.
At the ripened age of twenty-one, he dreams like a turtle from the island of tears. In his exile from the womanly physique, he is a blind man seeking the source where ladies warble like wrens.
And upon his 21st birthday, the ritual he has heard of is upon him. He blows into his flute a melody from ancestral myth as he walks the fragrant streets with women in black peeking out their doorways and throwing ashes upon their garments. They break flutes along his path leaving a wake of broken songs to serenade him with the crack of wood on stone. Death is an unwelcome guest in the house of his heart and the closer resemblance of his walk to a funeral procession than a sacred ceremony steals into his soul. His personal legend unfolds as he climbs the pyramid with each step a new note in his blown melody.
He arrives at the summit only to be greeted by a robed woman with no weapon in hand. Her two female attendants help him onto the rock slab where the sacrifice is to happen. Being the chosen one as an offering to the Sun God makes him blush with the honor of a soldier in the war of a tradition dying like the western sun but in full regalia. He pleads with the plumed serpent to spare him. Is the winged snake part of a bestiary of cloud realms only found in lifeless statues? Could his faith be a shriveled vine whose thirst no water can quench?
The priestess crouches, and charms his dreams to rest in the secret twinkle of her eye. Afterward, her magnetism has directed the pointer of his compass but toward the sun with her triumphant call of the hawk.
The bride releases her groom from the leper colony of monasticism. And Aztec mothers no longer watch their sons march into the arms of the death God. A new covenant with the plumed serpent arises. Ne’er again shall maidenhood be the sacrifice. The offering shall be an homage by the firstborn son whose sundial pose will be maintained through herbal medicine administered by the priestess and made potent by her black magic eyes. Thus it shall be for as long as the jaguar rules the jungle and the eagle cries in the sky over Tenochtitlan.
His masters tell him, “Don’t lock gaze with feminine eyes. The pit of fire lies deep and hungry like an eclipsed sun whose darkness drives both human and animal mad with black crystal visions to blind the male with the smoking coals of night.”
And the palace of his childhood dreams shakes with earthquakes from unseen fault lines of the fairer sex. Prepubescent lesson one is that female felicitation of form and gravity is evanescent as the morning mist before a summer’s day. Soft curves slope into the pits of depravity from which there is no escape. The plumed serpent is a jealous lover who owns your heart like an ancient fable. Do not awaken his hunger lest you bring ruin to the kingdom.
Like a fox on the run from dogs, he was hounded by the notion that this smear of women was a ploy to keep him out of the imperial harem and true to his virginal destiny. But like the fox, he knew how to evade the masters of his fate and find the hidden boudoirs where freedom lay in the arms of a courtesan.
So he drinks from the cup of fate with both his flutes the one he blows with his breath and the one brought to the cusp by his hand. In moments when his clouds of uncertainty part he considers that the two instruments of his passion, below and above, will not sustain his reluctant celibacy. In the evening as swallows warble in the eaves he will invite the maid in for more than a dusting.
At the ripened age of twenty-one, he dreams like a turtle from the island of tears. In his exile from the womanly physique, he is a blind man seeking the source where ladies warble like wrens.
And upon his 21st birthday, the ritual he has heard of is upon him. He blows into his flute a melody from ancestral myth as he walks the fragrant streets with women in black peeking out their doorways and throwing ashes upon their garments. They break flutes along his path leaving a wake of broken songs to serenade him with the crack of wood on stone. Death is an unwelcome guest in the house of his heart and the closer resemblance of his walk to a funeral procession than a sacred ceremony steals into his soul. His personal legend unfolds as he climbs the pyramid with each step a new note in his blown melody.
He arrives at the summit only to be greeted by a robed woman with no weapon in hand. Her two female attendants help him onto the rock slab where the sacrifice is to happen. Being the chosen one as an offering to the Sun God makes him blush with the honor of a soldier in the war of a tradition dying like the western sun but in full regalia. He pleads with the plumed serpent to spare him. Is the winged snake part of a bestiary of cloud realms only found in lifeless statues? Could his faith be a shriveled vine whose thirst no water can quench?
The priestess crouches, and charms his dreams to rest in the secret twinkle of her eye. Afterward, her magnetism has directed the pointer of his compass but toward the sun with her triumphant call of the hawk.
The bride releases her groom from the leper colony of monasticism. And Aztec mothers no longer watch their sons march into the arms of the death God. A new covenant with the plumed serpent arises. Ne’er again shall maidenhood be the sacrifice. The offering shall be an homage by the firstborn son whose sundial pose will be maintained through herbal medicine administered by the priestess and made potent by her black magic eyes. Thus it shall be for as long as the jaguar rules the jungle and the eagle cries in the sky over Tenochtitlan.
