At the Trebia

The living and the dead, they are but one. The ghosts that haunt the tiles of Rome, lion-headed, Greats and greater, lost, alive, afloat, legend. Parricide and parries, pithy claims and plights and blight and lives and losses but the Roman man staked into stake, dead as Kings in Brutus’ armed, Titus and Tiberius the slain yet Brutus is the man slayed. List, lost, listless as lust and living, love in ego et Rome. Abashed he, awashed, hated, bemused, baited, he washed upon the annals of “Rome” and the Tinicus. Masted last, the master of battle, war-torn forlorn the gated monster, Appian comquerer. The Herculean he. Shamed, shunned, shucked, shocked, shuttered he behind his pater’s past, boy-like boyhood in loss, shuffled in ice awash to his skin crawled the denouncement’s wave, blooded flesh in armoured souls beyond the man’s gaze — Ego! Esoteric no more! They flight in fight, drowned in basin Jupiter’s lips devour them — Run! Retreat! Duck into death’s embrace in flight from death himself! See he, I, he, paralleled! Child of fortune, fortuna fell fall upon you — master of none watch he - pater! Pattering of feet, watch! Your father falls. In the icy blood, steel dies last. Ant-like the men — unarmoured armed, wave crushes the blood of Rome. Duck! Dust! Dusk! Flying distance dissapating into the souls of men, in tassels and gold, the fire of Numidian arrows flocked to glock into the by-pieces, those not tamed by the sea, crushed to Stygian sleep. And fight! Fight, men, fight! For one foreign hour the barbarians rush, ablaze by Baal’s flame blushed by night, slash, slunk, seethe — revenge comes for those wronged by Rome. And watchéd he, him, they. He, the reigned, the master, goat-like lion headed aloft on grey horned beasted, he, Hannibal, watched as his burn pulsed alive. And watchéd he, the child, unborn unbidden, parricide prevented in valiance, in death living saved from the depths of red ice, the Trebia’s next victim he breathed another day into his lineage. Scipio, child, watchéd was you by the goat of the barbarians, the fire of the dead, the lion’s head of the horn, met, meet, eyes glocked from across the bath of Roman blood. Memorise his eye, this beast on your lands, hold his gaze as you flush away, rushed into your father’s home.