Roman Time

Time passes, I change; my poetry changes with me. What was once beautiful is deadpan. What was once true, now seems foolish. I write until I have nothing left, then I look down and see a vast expanse of nothing spread over years of pointless thought and aggravation. Love is my banner, my Imperial Eagle, and the path of my Legion's bootheels. Now, it's all the same. Every word I write to chronicle the Void just makes it larger. Perhaps if I wrote and spoke earlier, things would be different, but now I feel lost. My soldiers of verse crossed the Rubicon, and can't find their way back. I chased Prester Bane's forces to the end of my exhaustion: no Zama lies ahead of me. Signs point to Cannae, from there to the Teutoburg Forest, into the sands of the Collosseum, and all the way past Garibaldi's Redshirts to the Lateran Treaty. My future is well established, but surrounded by a bald, bragging, arrogant tyrant with grand visions of my return to prominence. Eventually, he'll hang by his heels; most will approve, but I will never, ever be the same as I was in the beginning. Aeneas is a myth; Vergil wrote him that way. Caesar conquered Gaul, but is mostly remembered for how and why he died. A good thing came and changed all the rules for me: Lions don't prowl the sands as they used to, but my affliction remains, despite the old wounds now sealed. I have beautiful ceilings, and more gold than Croesus would dream possible, but I've lost the promise of a different tomorrow. Things for me seem sealed at one end: I can't go back. Aeneas could tell you that, but he's gone into myth with Vergil. The rest is a distant memory of greatness and what could have been. Now that the years since salvation outnumber the years before, I've even lost that feeling of normalcy. The same wounds hurt, and seek the same rememdies. Tomorrow is today seen through yesterday's eyeglasses, and obscured by the blinders that block the way back home.