The gods

always have best choice, first choice, 
and they're allowed to change their minds 
but we can't ever be fickle— we're mere 
mortals after all, and fools to invoke 
some sort of urgency like the heart, 
so if winter has been here forever, 
how much do you think spring 
will cost because from experience, 
the cleaners always make a killing 
once they're corporatized, though I 
would so like to be a woman of more 
than domestic and womanly service 
and sacrifice of parts because I know 
in the end, Death redeems nothing; and 
still the gods always have the best 
choice, a choice in weapons for war 
and for marketable words; in women, 
in wives, in boys they also take 
pleasure in as well as animals 
in the forests and fields like dogs 
or oxen or pheasants or swans, 
anything with a neck that can both 
bend and snap; and the waterways 
are littered with the afterhusks 
of all the choices they made 
before they changed their minds 
before a previous set of choices 
so now we have to talk about 
resilience and climate change 
and ocean rise while they keep 
harping on their days of glory 
when people and things knew 
their place and the parties, 
the parties, weren't they wild 
and fabulous— though it's not 
clear anymore if there was a true 
before and after, because we also 
got confused: and didn't Yoda say 
Always two there are, no more 
no less: a master and an apprentice 
and we know he was talking about a Sith, 
so what's up with how the gods always 
have at least two sets of names, one 
supposedly for use in those kingdoms 
overshadowed by whitewashed palaces 
against skies and seas of tourist blue, 
one for that kingdom from which our 
notions of legislation and law 
and the virtues of the middle way 
were supposedly drawn— but who 
actually knows why Hercules was 
Heracles, Artemis was Diana, 
Mercury was Hermes, who's also
associated with Prometheus... or 
am I mixing them up and being 
an unreliable witness, and I say 
witness for haven't they also come 
interfering in my own affairs, some 
cop on beat peering lewdly through 
the open car window to ask if everything 
was alright as I sat, right breast exposed 
and feeding an infant on my lap; then 
there'll be those making impossible demands 
like which half of your child or dog or cat 
or house or some other form of beloved 
would you most wish to keep after it 
has been severed in half or kidnapped 
by some tyrant of darkness, but if 
your hand so much as flew up to cover 
your mouth in fear or alarm or made 
a fist as if to strike out or protest 
then god help you, they'll say, god 
help you, which you know is code 
for you are so so very on your own.