| The Minotaur Speaks Christopher Bernard |
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[Listen to a reading of this poem.] In the darkness a line glimmers~ like a piece of spider silk, a tendril of its web~ quivers and pulls around another corner, then disappears into the gloom, trembling in the rancid darkness, hot and stale as a cellar, binding the random corners of my chaotic home. At one end clings the man the gods have sent to kill me~ (we'll see about that!)~but the thread's other end winds and coils and shines, leading . . . where? Oh, farther into the maze where father Minos left me, the bestial child his whore of a wife, my mother Pasiphae, |
dropped nine months after coupling with the Thracian bull whose member she had coveted~ mating monster with monster, how did they expect to escape having a monster for their offspring! And so Minos threw me into this foul place, scrawled into confusion like a ball of tangled yarn, no one can find a way out of, no matter how brave or cunning, a darkness I explore to find but deeper darkness, and there left me, to feed on sacrificial virgins, the beautiful, pure-skinned children of the Greeks. I trip over their bones as I bang from wall to wall, lost, hungry, bellowing in the dark,  |
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