Mere mortals weak mortals I hear my brethren say
My brethren who delight in the savor of smoky hecatombs
And they deride human incapacity
And mock the desperation of mortal importunity
Which is the god of axle grease
Which of diseases of the bladder
And they vaunt that we gods alone conceive
The vast extent of our Olympian powers
The countless elements over which we preside
But as the presider over axle grease I say unto them
That no power on earth or above it or below
Is perfect whole complete or absolute
And your vaunted power will come crashing down around your ears
And the greatest capacity is where
You least expect to find it

And my brother gods are more capable
Than they themselves imagine
For they do not understand
The simple concept of an avatar
That Athena and Artemis are one and the same
As are my fine pupils Hermes and Dionysus
That Zeus becomes Ares when he gets his sword from me
And that Aphrodite becomes Hera
When after all that lovemaking she grows large with child
And only one god I know beside myself is relatively entire
Poseidon driver of horses breaker of cities
Promulgator of storms at sea
Which Zeus then arrogates to himself
In the rare event they make landfall

And in my own human avatar as Daedelus
For yes we gods often take human form
Or less imaginative forms of bull eagle or rain shower
Just ask Aphrodite about Helen and Cleopatra
And all the other belles dames sans merci
But in my human avatar I am responsible
For all the knives crowbars scythes and plows
Bowls skillets sieves fleshpots kneading troughs and winnowing fans
Swords halberds bayonets dirks artillery pieces
Saddles horseshoes bits reins halters
And all miscellaneous articles of equipage
Tools that make other tools
Anvils lathes chisels augers awls vats hammers tongs
Nails pins screws hooks pulleys hoops locks
Tweezers razors and other apparatus of the depilatory and tonsorial arts
And wheels and yes axles wagons chariots dog-carts and locomotives
Stools tripods doorknobs hinges
Thrones crowns scepters medallions and insignias of rank
Necklaces bracelets brooches bangles bells buckles and baubles
Snares fishhooks fowling pieces
Steeples cupolas coigns banisters battlements bastions
Posts lintels casements lath plaster rafters joists cornices foundations
Rods that support
Rods that chastise
Rods that reinforce
All the gear and tackle and trim of every ironmonger that ever lived
Braziers griddles ovens andirons bellows
Campfires funeral pyres torches candles
Lamps magical and pedestrian
And the so-called natural phenomena of lava flows and boiling springs
Zeus will tell you that Athena sprang forth fully armed
But in fact I father all who bear spears greaves or helmets
An Egyptian ape-god invented the pen
And Hermes also first contrived the lyre
Though I’ve heard Apollo falsely claim that achievement
Hera brought to light the feminine lore for spinning yarn
For subtle webs wigwams cunning knot of string and thread
A blanket to wrap the newborn in
My wife Aphrod-Ishtar invented nothing unknown to horse and swine
And Pan instituted the woodwind section
But all other inventions are mine
Notably all instruments that are struck hard or softly
Including the pianoforte
I rule half the elements in the universe
Water I concede to Zeus and Poseidon
But I claim earth and fire

I shall not complain of those eminences who preceded me
Nor shall I wail in envy that they among others
Should receive the fruits of votive shrine and virgin chant
While I bustle about an object of ridicule
A limping cuckold
Liked a little more than temple rat
Loved a little less than Ganymede the Brat
But in this the gods simply expose their ignorance
Whilst I indulge their folly with a mirthful misshapen countenance
That doubtless betrays my inward glee
To be a god of such noble accomplishment
And though temples in my honor are but few
They are not entirely lacking
They still worship me in Al Abam
Now take the one who demands to be called The God or The Father
Who flits about the vaporous element he tries to style the firmament
Object of adoration among those of smug and jejune understanding
Who has shown himself skilled at fornicating and throwing things
Me for example when he shrieked
I’ll drive you into the ground from whence you came
And tore my leg from its socket
So strong and yet infinitely less than almighty
As seen by his base attempt to fob the deed off on my mother
And don’t misrepresent me wrathful fool
When I claim earth I refer to the durable substance
That makes up its great elemental bulk
And obviously I do not mean
The arable land sacred to Dea Mater
That small portion of the earth toward which you have legitimate rights
As memorialized in nursery rhymes
His sweet showers
Have great powers
To bring flowers
And why do you insist on exposing your shortcomings
By inflating your assets

I am an old greybeard
Though not as old as Poseidon Whitebeard
Or Zeus of the Receding Hairline
I speak not of them but will first speak of the younger echelon
Some of whom graciously accept my tutelage
While others like him who calls himself Apellon or Phos Boy
Stay snobbishly aloof in their conceit
We first heard of him when as Aplu he came out of the east
With no more portfolio than to act
As cause and cure of infections carried by mice
Which experience in epidemiology
Gave him a certain arithmetical facility
To divide categorize and torment with plagues
Whole populations and a memory
Never to forget a slight or fail to retaliate for it
There happened to be an opening in our ranks
Following the purge of the elder race
And more specifically the demise of the one called Over
Who had been deposed by you-know-who Mister Sky
Well I made the boy what he became
His bow I suppose he acquired from the fiddlers
Who ply their trade in the deserts of Asia
But the feathered arrows with their adamantine tips
Who could have devised those delicate implements
And I gave him so boundless is my generosity
The most marvelous chariot to traverse
The rising dome of his Father’s dominions
Well lubricated to be sure
And I gave him the triple toolkit
Compass straight edge and plumbline
Which in his avatars as Euclid and Pythagoras
He used to trace the myriad designs
Cast in shadow on the face of earth
Which belongs to me
And the ingrate would exaggerate his attainments
How impressive is it really to slay a snake
Which beast was none other than my ingenious charge Dionysus
And Mouse Boy the interloper in the Wine Giver’s garden
And little did Photo Chrome consider that The Vine
Regenerates after the harvest
As the scotch’d serpent closes
And not content with measure and number
Apollo must claim those other numbers
That make up the scansion of sacred song
And minstrel lay and pastoral idyll and heroic tale
Which had emerged many eons before his own obscure birth

But let me turn to one more appealing than the vengeful adolescent
Hermes first came to my notice as the writing-ape of Egypt
And I was touched by the humanitarianism of one
Concerned to raise those benighted wretches into the light of civilization
They had observed him deep in the Afric forest
Cool as a cucumber sandwich
Probing with a stick in the insect nests
Though the lewdly given called it a stick of flesh not of wood
And he turned and demonstrated with glance and gesture
How to apply the pismire fluid to dried leaves
And better how to use the stems of water plants
Cunningly pressed to work as artificial leaves
For the storage of tallies in grain oil slaves beer and leather goods
And much later to record the genealogies of gods and emperors
Need I add that this same tale
Is repeated in the Panic key
With the invention of the syrinx
The origin of the Dionysian pipes
And Hermes assumes a thousand avatars
Disguised as meteor mote messenger or crewcut college boy
Or indeed any being for which there is a word
So that half the revelations from God-on-High
Are but the freaks and pranks of clever Never Settles
But when next we saw Hermes he stood stock-stone still
At the corner of a field
And this time he truly resembled nothing so much as
A man’s fleshy stick
The organ of generation
A snake or twining of snakes
Not one of us not even Scare Thrower
Could resist a laugh or resist loving the roguish chameleon
Though Herr Flingfling threw a rock of course
So each of the rest of us rolled a pebble
Burlesquing that aggressive act
Off the winsome lad’s smooth round head
Until only his smooth head was visible
Out of the tall narrow cairn
And I fashioned him a helmet
Purely decorative
To defend him I said against boors who throw rocks
And I’ll tell you how he became my pupil
For I named him Mutability
And I showed him how to turn sand into glass
And how to carry a secret in a pouch of tin
And how to free the living quicksilver
From its pulverulent prison
And though I myself hobble
How to run as a sparrow flies
And how to fly as a cat runs
And how to keep two dwellings
One up here in the palace I built
The other a playhouse below for mischievous children
And how to make his way without chart or compass
In the byways of men
To whom he appears a fetching silvery sylph

If humans saw us in our own appearance they would be horrified
No wonder they turn to stone or pillars of salt
When they catch a nympholeptic glimpse
The eyes of Athena for example are often described in human idiom
As lustrous lead but a closer look
Reveals the intricate clockwork mechanism
Of a million million nanogears
And escapements shaped like microscopic siege engines
And connective tissue slipping in lubricious soup of roiling buckyballs
The better to reckon means and ends
Calculate the trajectory
Apollonian cogitation
For bringing down prey or an adversary
And Hera’s eyes really are those of an ox
Though buffalo cow would be a better translation
And my own visage displays an asymmetry
Unlikely ever to join the canon of anthropoid fashion
And my halting speech matches my halting gait
So forgive me if I digress and speak ex tempore

And so to return to my theme
Let me speak of another of my young favorites
Dionysus god of mortality and resurrection
Whom Zeus claimed to gestate in his thigh
Or some such nonsense
The fact is that having impregnated some ninny schoolgirl
As He always does
Zeus tired of the sport vaporized the maid
And left the products of conception on the ground to rot
Until Hermes ever-alert scooped up the protoplasm
For a little mashing together was all the gestation required
And entrusted the embryonic matter
To some kindly childless earthlings
Who raised the babe as their own
And accounts abounded among the credulous
Of virgin birth and novel stars and heavenly hosts
But when his true nature revealing itself
As a toddler he began ripping up forests
Driving leopards into the village
And throwing cars around like Father like son
I collected the godling and settled him in a fruited jungle
He could call his own and destroy to his heart’s content
Where his tendril-like habit of clinging to vegetation
Gained him a reputation as the subtlest beast of the field
For I would not bring him to Olympus
For Captain Terrible to throw around
And to Dion too I taught the arts of metamorphosis
As I had Hermes
And on his own he learned the knack
For turning berries into divine liquid madness
By transfusing his living blood into the fruited vines
For thick blood and not insipid ichor flows through his veins
And he caused the gore to spoil and rot
For he had been born in rottenness
That whosoever should drink of it
Would be filled with the blood of the god
The blood of the new and everlasting life-in-death
And just as I in Promethean avatar
Gave my fire to help the poor manlings
Though naturally somebody else had to call it His
So too Dionysus presented his elixir
To assuage affliction and unleash the truth
Which for mortals is the truth of their imminent dissolution
And in gratitude for his human upbringing
He allows himself annually to be torn limb from limb
Like his foster-father and humble preceptor
And consumed bodily
As a mother gives of her substance to nourish the babe
Until such time in three or four days
As it please him to resurge phoenix-like
Fresh and sweet to begin the cycle again
The face and torso of a woman
A man’s power to fall and rise again
And so Dionysus chooses to dwell among women and men
And to them he gave the inestimable boon of madness

And here’s how fine humans are
Surveying them is like seeing the iridescence of a Damascus blade
In any group of them one or more will have drunk the cup of madness
And the madman will do something crazy
And then drink the cup of hemlock
That unhappy collaboration of Dion and Apollo
Sometimes the madman will imagine himself a little Ares
And start chopping up his hallucinated enemies
Nursing mothers cats and dogs infidels spectators at a foot race
Before falling on his sword
But once in awhile the madness turns to glory
One time in an act of unaccustomed generosity to humans
Apollo gave them his lyre secretly the gift of Hermes
And for millennia men plinked and plunked away
Raising ululant songs to Zeus
Halalalalalu Ya
For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth
How glad we are to be your silly sheep O Father
How you comfort us
When you thwack us with your rod and your staff
Until a drunken madman one Jimi Orpheus
Inspired by me Hephaestus
Put ferrous magnets on a lyre
Making the lyre itself speak and sing
I can’t be satisfied
Essential creed of those who strive and aspire
But still I confess my own preference for pipes and timbrels

As complacent humans alas their preference for Ares
At whose behest I created the sword
Humans so impressed by jerk of catapult
By hail of arrows
And those who survive the carnage
Clink their glasses and sing
We few we happy few
Feasting on the flesh of their comrades

I do not scorn the human kind
In fact I rather like them
Witness the shield I made for that beautiful prince
So much more man than god
To console him in his mortality
The miraculous moving images
The fine achievements of man
And a few of the coarser ones
The crops and flocks
The festivals and assemblies
The cunning of attack and the solidarity of defense
There are two kinds of being in the universe
There’s the kind that’s always the same
Like the simple vengeful sun
But man is of the latter kind
The kind that changes
Like the restless sea
In his communion with the serene transfiguring moon

For Artemis my avatar most unlike myself
Gives us to understand if we are willing
My foster-children on earth
Secret minions of the moon
To them as to her I gave a simple stick
Which she immediately employed
To bring down the hind and the pheasant
For she is as the mountain slope
Where the pard dispatches the kid
And like the earthlings she received
From Ares-Apollo the shaft and the bow
Since we have already established the arrow’s head as mine
But as Artemis is a goddess this acquirement
Did not alter her essential nature
Which paradoxically is both changeable and eternally chaste
Whisper of nightingales and embers’ polychromatic glow
But with humans we can speak of a long complex development
We have spoken how my son Hermes
Used his staff to show the primate humans
How to fish for grubs and termites
But know now that unaccountably and on their own
The earthlings enlarged the use of the stick
To obtain more substantial quarry
Small animals little birds and turtles to make into lyres
And moving on to sheep antelopes and others of the grazing kind
And at last alas themselves
But most miraculously they transmuted their dexterity
Into spells incantations verbal formulae
Rhymes instructions recipes and the devices of Mnemosyne
That the fables of their discoveries
Need never perish from the earth
From there it needed only me
To demonstrate the sorcery of metallurgy
For the world to bloom into a garden of artifice

I stand accused of betraying Olympus
By making man the rival of the gods
But I am not blameworthy if such a dire eventuality has occurred
If you consider the case rationally you will see that I am right
Now most of you gods no doubt will grumble
Why should we rationalize like a schoolteacher
A little man with spectacles and a pointed beard
I’m quite sure that you my brethren would be content
If I were to continue assembling your home furnishings for you
And renounce my ties to the pathetic weaklings below
Even as you spread your nostrils
To relish the holocausts of flesh fat and bone
That weak man gives you the strong from my fire
Yes I gave man fire
Though Thunder Toss has invented the fiction
That it was some Titan unavailable to testify now
Suspiciously engaged with an eagle on a mountainside
Does anyone seriously believe that fire came from
A sparkling ephemeral shard of light
When the whole crust of earth
Veritably floats on liquid fire
And even if Metheus had touched a stick
To Zeus’s precious bolt
And who is the god of sticks I remind you
Even if the Titan had used the spark to ignite the rod
The act cannot be called a theft
For how in this has Zeus been bereft of anything
As if that soggy pluvious parvenu has aught to do with fire
So yes I gave man fire from my own inexhaustible store
Man whom you depend upon and fear
Who has more wisdom in his weakness than you in your strength
And what care I if humans seek to profit
From the fruits of my inventiveness
I owe my fealty to Poseidon the Ancient
Chief among those who disdain
To teeter on Olympus peak
And when Poseidon please to break open the earth
I oblige with flow of liquid rock
A change has come upon the earth
Which humans now paradoxically call a planet
For the humans are doing all they can
To raise the level of the sea
Until it engulf not only their own mad frenzied race
But someday soon will drown Olympus too