I am Sibyl.
I do not write to warn.
These are fragments of visions
they came to me in fits of alien thoughts.
Each god spoke—some plainly, others in images.
This is not dead mythology,
this is the end of stories.
Reflections of Mnemosyne
I am memory and yet I’m beginning to be forgotten. Where do those parts of me go? Is this a true annihilation? Not even the imprints remain.
One day I will be a husk of this present moment. No past, no prophecy, just now. And will that be enough? I wonder if the Olympians have begun to lose their powers as well.
I know I’m forgetting because there are primordial things I no longer recognize. The flower of Promethean fire seems to me an alien form.
Some vein within me is draining these archetypes of their substance. Its outlet I know not where. This is the place after death, where forgotten memories flee to return. Where not just hero, but the category of heroic fails. Where monstrosity is vanquished. Where stories are untold. Where recollection summons even that which is dead. And a life anew is thrown into the spirals of dementia landing in disintegration.
I will dictate all story through the Muses, through Sibyl,
and with it set down the fragments—somewhere— so my inheritors may know what I once knew.
Where to begin but with the first memory that comes to mind.
Prometheus Rebound
Every morning, the eagle returned.
Each night, he dreamt himself whole.
Pain was flux—Prometheus, its channel delta,
Above, Zeus’s oak twisted skyward,
its dendrites crackling with flame:
lightning arcs,
beaconing to the birds and muses.
The carrion-eaters circled.
An eagle broke from its perch—
talons sank,
beak shore flesh.
The sea ran blind-dark with blood.
His eyes—empty sockets.
Bound in night,
eagle-eyed seer,
he foresaw Typhon’s writhing fall—
myths unraveling into memory:
the cosmos rotting
from Logos,
to Eros,
to mother Chaos.
Some days, he fought.
Unseen ravens crowed:
“Death is a forlorn hope.
When the Caucasus crumbles,
the Furies will hover in our stead
over glass-blown plains.”
His fingers curled—reflex arcs,
an eternal spiral,
closing into a shaking fist.
Life was a nervous flinch.
“Why must I endure?
Why must I know that I endure?”
The eagle flayed his flesh.
But intellect scars the soul.
He honed his wits
on sand-flowing discs,
auguring Sunny Helios’ inconstant fall.
One dawn, he did not wake—
no eagle came.
No carrion-feasters.
Only wind,
scraping the promontory.
A wisp within Prometheus
expected a missing torture.
The adamant chains,
rusted by eons,
shuddered.
He rose—
temples thundering,
Titan heaving skyward,
joints grinding.
Blindness cleared.
Into white seer’s orbs,
he gazed beyond scorched membrane,
through reflecting nests of opal—
to the pearl of soul
beneath the flux of forms
“Why must good dreams end?”
Reborn, we clutch the thin-veined embryo of hope,
but our dread remains an egg-eating serpent—
a hatch of squawking eaglets born to die
by The Fates’ will,
bursting from the night,
bounded and rebounding.
Sisyphus
He was to cunning
what Daedalus was to craft—
unparalleled in guile.
When he witnessed one of Zeus’s mortal liaisons,
he was sentenced to death.
Thanatos came, draped in shadow.
But when Sisyphus crossed the Styx,
Charon did not ferry him—
a lapse in divine order,
there was no appeal.
Thanatos, ever the braggart,
boasted his chains could never break.
Feigning awe,
Sisyphus asked their secret.
Thanatos, dead-eyed,
unshackled himself to demonstrate.
With the swiftness of a man
who had wagered against death itself,
Sisyphus seized the chains—
bound the death god and its warden alike.
He ruled Hades.
The old withered.
The sick decayed.
The dying lingered at thresholds, unable to cross.
The gods bargained.
They offered eternity.
He agreed to the settlement.
Hermes drafted the unconscionable contract—
clause upon clause,
language like labyrinths.
Only later did Sisyphus grasp
what eternal life would mean.
To be alive—
to think that’s all one needs to be.
At first, it was liberation:
no fear,
no end,
only the endless basking of being.
But pain endures
where joy decays.
Sorrow hefted across eternity
ceases to be sorrow—
it becomes routine.
His soul was sentenced to Tartarus,
his body left to wander.
Once—lulled by Orpheus’s song—
he forgot his fate.
Once, he tried to trick Persephone
into granting him true death,
to drift mindless through ashen fields.
But the gods had learned his ways.
Now, only through continual self-deception
does he remain sane.
And so, he lifts the boulder—
as if his sentence were just overturned.
And so, the sun rolls on.
Each morning, as the light returns,
he tricks himself:
This is the first time.
Medusa
Before the curse, I knew:
My beauty petrifies—cold as stone, it alienates.
I never trust reflections—
those faces trailing behind.
When Athena arrived, gnashing divine pettiness,
I was not surprised.
I remember the eyes of the agora,
drinking in my beauty—
the gods are mirrors to men.
To be leered at—whether from high or low—is an insult.
That’s why Zeus’s brain child broke.
I had grown wise.
The gods punished not my sin;
but their stolen pride.
To be seen is distortion,
to be worshiped, stripped of humanity.
They claimed I desecrated wisdom’s sanctum,
and now, they feared me.
When they cursed me,
did they expect me to kneel for my beheading?
What was I before?
A pedestal, a display.
Now?
A monument to fear—
a menacing frieze.
How I long to brush my hair.
But I’ve stared myself to ruin—
Eternity grinds sundials to dust.
When Zeus’s time comes—
when his epithets fade,
his monuments crack—
let him be forgotten.
All is for naught
Let Them be seen through.
My eyes are the last soul they will ever know—
I am Medusa,
my gaze meets the heavens.
See the firmament heed its name.
My gaze still burns in the aegis.
I weep inert tears
Cassandra’s Plea
To behold the end in the prelude of youth—
my foresight spills like poetry,
never understood until reread,
with the retrospect of years behind the eyes.
Why, Apollo, were you angry?
Because I was barren for you?
Did you not foresee it?
Now, with a tongue tied by fate,
I wave talismans like charms against the future.
Yet dread ceases to be evil when it is certain.
Only when I lie am I believed:
that Troy shall vanquish your foes,
that Astyanax will grow as strong as his father,
that good will befall the house of Priam,
that Athena will keep me inviolate at her sanctum.
And yet, I cannot lie to myself.
But should I?
Why, Apollo, do you not lift the curse,
when I could save your champion?
There must be a reason—I need to believe it.
Spitting curses in future truths,
and yet I remain enslaved,
while you reign king.
If I declared that the sun will not rise tomorrow,
they would believe me only too late.
My tragedy is bathetic and predictable.
I reel before the punchline.
The arrogance of men damns them—
to think they can break fate by denying it.
And yet it is my own.
For if I could truly prophesy,
it could not be changed.
Such is the nature of seers:
the future is already their past.
My tomorrow was yesterday.
Pygmalion
Perfection is cruel to love.
To master one’s art is a beautiful death—
a slow dilemma beginning in longing
settling into surrender.
Time carves away possibility, leaving the inevitable
Masterpieces form in missed moments,
brilliance revealed only when the dust settles.
The beauty of flesh is sublime in its fading,
chipped away by the sun’s relentless chisel.
Pygmalion carved Galatea from stone,
never realizing the doom he wrought her.
His divine wish bound her to ruin—
alabaster white, lips soft as down, hair spun fine as web.
In time, he beheld the consequences of his craft.
Perfection belongs to gods—
or obsessives.
Did Galatea’s inanimate form love him back?
Like the ideal made real, energies flow through stone,
as mind through matter—
no true boundary between them.
Galatea waits only for recognition.
And Art grants artificial life;
life, in turn, bestows meaning upon artifice.
Yet a man is more than mere mind.
One day, his love transcended piety.
At the temple of Aphrodite, he knelt—
not for art, but for life;
not for illusion, but ruin.
She—bored or merciful—heard him.
What happened next—
whether love turned Galatea to flesh
or Pygmalion to alabaster—
In the end, she was moved, and he did not.
Orpheus Refrain
At the height of joy, the serpent struck—
just pinprick and breath.
Eurydice:
a grace note dying in the air.
He turned; she passed.
Birdsong fell silent,
harping on missing melody.
A cruel Threnody,
A screeching air on hell’s heartstrings.
The Muse muted, he ceased to write.
Days stretched meaningless.
He plucked fragmented melodies from a shattered mind—
broken hymns mocking the one who once held gods entranced.
One night, he swore he heard her lullaby;
he followed, feckless.
His lyre struck stone and splintered,
strings recoiling like strands of her hair—
holy-wood for kindling, a sacrifice to silence.
At his lowest, he became inaudible.
Honeyed voices lilted his lamentations,
mistaking grief for grace.
In that refrain, he heard her swan song.
And questioned his love for her. Was it for her or the muse?
Bards will rehearse his improvisations and call it art—
a man sings his sorrow, and the world sings back,
yet the song is never for him.
Still, the music plays.
Doomed, he looked forward.
As the world rounds back.
Love at his periphery.
Each note a step behind him;
each silence, an unwritten piece.
All was music.
Blessed music.
Divine and rational.
That was before Eurydice.
Did she love him for the music?
Grief reshaped simple themes,
like a fugue slowed to a drone.
To the final rest…
To that lovely theme, fading unresolved.
Coda-ing a dread dirge—
an asphodel for the still living.
Hermes
I am the maker of luck.
The teaser of fortune.
I zip as fast as word itself
through the banquets of Mount Olympus,
whispering secrets from one holey ear to another.
“Ares has been consorting with your wife, gruff Hephaestus.
Seems all is fair in love and war.”
“Blast those easy bedfellows! I’ll forge a trap for them.”
“Jealousy dealt with in your own fashion.”
Past peace-loving Hestia I dart,
leaving her flickering—more vigil than goddess.
To Apollo I zip like a love-lashed pegasus:
“Hail, brother. No hard feelings for my thievery—
I did invent the lyre you cherish, after all.”
“Hail not in the sun’s presence.
You made the tools. I made the art.”
“If air is the medium for message,
then Zeus made my breath. And we are all tools of fate.”
Like a discus through that same air,
I land near Hades, dour as always.
“Your psychopomp, my liege,” I grinned fantastically.
“Guide Sisyphus back to Tartarus.
He grows weary of cheating life.”
“Yes, m’lord,”
“Fitting, that I ferry the trickster to despair.” Hades did not move.
So I play my part,
sparkling as wit’s avatar.
A divine fool
spinning threads the Fates themselves misplace.
And then the gods go to sleep,
and I am alone.
Bend the spine and listen well.
A wit without witness
is a fool without appeal.
Fate is the odds I rig and roll.
A game unsolved is still worth playing.
Yet how game am I,
if I cannot lose?
That is my curse and blessing.
To move without destination,
to jest without the fits of laughter.
“Only the fates can finish the joke.”
From what muse did that come from?
Oh, there’s Melpomene at my elbow.
Hello, Cathartic one.
Off to Tartarus I fly “free”. Anon good riddler.
Hephaestus
God of fire—
Crippled by nature,
Cast by nurturer,
Most pitiable among gods.
From what mold is lightning forged?
The synapse of thought’s design—
the arc of a single mechanical mind.
Yet you do not wield your weapons. Ambidexter.
Conceived with Venus, you imbue them with yourself—
a love for the making.
Cast by the king into the crucible of storm,
destroyed
as a sword does a heart song.
Lose yourself in thundercraft.
Erupt your attentions upon the anvil.
Flow into forms of function.
Engineer artificial life. The beingness of being.
Imbue your shame in weapons of destruction.
Enliven gold maidens with inborn grace.
Tripod Olympus with trays of ambrosia.
Build the houses of heaven.
You are your function.
Sparks fly like stars in the night,
falling to the floor where they dissipate—
their source a bolt of fire,
molten plasma piercing thin air.
Creating categories out of emptiness.
This is ordinate artistry:
you are a machinist’s cog
in a clockwork cosmos.
Tithonus
The Goddess of a new day Dusts silver grass with the melting gilt of dawn-light.
Then Rosy-fingered Eos plucks young Tithonus from his burning city of home.
Doomed to demented dusk, he was to be the wishful love of morning,
a warping of time, a near-immortal infatuation.
For the first century, he was lucid and carefree.
Life was but a pleasant daydream afternoon.
But time gnawed at mind and memory,
diminishing him to a grey shade—
forsook by Mnemosyne.
To ghoulish gibberer.
Deathless dementiac.
Ceaseless cancer.
Outside mercy.
Cicada song.
Insect husk.
Dust.
Thanatos
There is a weariness no sleep can cure—
It arrives without footsteps,
yet pounds in the ear.
No victor, no fool, no king is spared.
He comes and goes like a trumpeting reveille’s breath,
a bloom that tarnishes life with death’s wake.
Must we fear him?
Not for his presence—
but for his surprise.
An executioner’s whistled tune
ascends through vaulted skies,
beyond the known,
into waveforms of immortal hope, or endless void.
We rage against the paradigm—
infants wailing at birth,
lovers clinging for warmth.
Death, oh Death—
life’s final revelation,
its quietest refrain.
Do not sing my song.
It must not end.
Let me sleep.
Theoxenia
Baucis and Philemon lived simply, loved deeply.
Two beggars knocked; hosts opened.
Wine refilled. Bread broke.
Zeus and Hermes nodded—
Kindness repaid in stone and branches.
The last goose chased in sacrifice—unnecessary.
The immortals left them unbroken.
Their fingers intertwined boughs,
Their love evergreen.
The gods remember kindness,
Even if they only reward it in myth.
Humility is plenty.
Hubris a beggar.
Every fiction must have a moral.
Zeus Moiragetes
From the mouth of the oracle Sibyl:
Lines intersect in matrices.
Finer silk than spider’s.
Cut, measured, selected—
dead hairs woven
into the tapestry of all things.
A shroud to cover the sun,
hung upon the stars,
a new sheet:
dips and wrinkles
over unseen space and time.
When, why, and where.
the Fates will thread God anew—
new and never known,
not even to destiny.
When will Atropos cut her own?
The final stitch in being.
Fated to end fate. Looming in the dark.
Why will Lakhesis measure her life taut.
A segment of a longer gathering.
From where will clotho select her own beginning?
Knowing that creation is a hollow roll.
I prophesy the end is nigh.
Dionysian Din
O, Polynym—first and last.
Osirian shade, Zagrean revenant.
Chthonic grain of Gaia, twice-made of Zeus,
Eleusinian mask, veiled and defaced.
Disgorged, reborn—
Madness devours;
delirium takes the throne.
If Hades preserves the soul,
Dionysus divides the divine.
Patricide, drunken king,
the worm in the grape,
decay of the spirit—
That god of mind’s marginalia.
Let law ferment in debasement.
Let lightning strike itself from the sky.
Watch as synapses burn out.
Blast the heath, the hearth, the heart.
From Earth womb to tomb—
Let stars spill, wine-bright.
Let logos rot in its lobe.
Sunstunned in the cave,
the philosopher is eaten by insects.
From the corpse, the god revives.
Ashes to the vine—
desire overflows.
Dash the trinities-
From dust to lust,
from no-thing, pantheons.
Drink. Drown. Devour.
Paean to Apollo
O god of enlightenment,
grant us a reason not to worship,
and I’ll call it irrational—a divine contradiction.
You who draw forms from Zeus’s mind,
transpose sweet music upon gut string,
heal the sick and sicken the healthy—
your oxymoron fuels our soul’s appetite.
Slayer of Drakon, first Pythian champion!
From Mount Helicon, your daughters inspire contests;
from your Phoebus, all formulae derive.
Physician and plague-bearer, seer and player—
a light that blinds as much as it reveals.
You dissect the soul.
To you, loss is a tally mark.
anachoresis of sun spears to void.
The future a foregone conclusion;
the death of your religion, preordained.
Apeiron gives shape to all—a tripod of matter, mind, and math.
Let Orpheus’ lyre ring; Let numbers play.
A loosed arrow finds its mark,
like lovers who kneel before the sun’s idol,
only to burn in its warmth.
Their whitened eyes peer into the motes of another morning,
recalling a future sunrise.
A holy eve for each deathday.
The Flight of Icarus
Apollo watched from his chariot—
the boy with wings crafted by his father,
the slow-turning world beneath.
He had witnessed reckless things bound for earth;
once, he warned Phaethon.
Now, he remained silent.
All rising things fall.
Daedalus gave him words,
Icarus listened—and did not listen.
At the tower’s edge, the sea below stretched like bronze foil,
while the labyrinth coiled—
a creation of men, meant for monsters.
The wind tousled his hair; his heart, a firebird trapped in his chest.
And he leapt.
For a time, he was as the gods:
wings beating, gust lifting him,
his shadow fleeing across the maze.
“The ceiling has no end.”
This tunnel of angelic light, a fractal vault,
is merely a perimeter of god.
The line of our soul’s extremity.
From above, the labyrinth was nothing—
merely a riddle without a question.
Perhaps the maze was never meant to be solved from within.
So he climbed.
The air glass in his lungs,
the sun basked him, vast and black-spotted, seething warmth.
A feather lifted, wax rained, his wings faltered.
Then he fell. An eagle tumbling down.
The sky rushed past; the world a rising level.
His heart clawed at empty air,
he twisted—sun spinning, earth rising, sea yawning.
The map laid flat beneath him.
The maze is never solved from above.
For one fleeting moment, he saw as moths do lanterns.
Apollo did not look away.
The boy struck the water;
the waves carried him to the Styx.
What sleeps within the shadow of the sun?
Does it feel guilt? The sun does not blink.
yet Daedalus buried his only son.
Psyche
Psyche is my godship.
Through the tribulations of love I was made immortal.
An irritant to a pearl.
Purblind to my value.
I now opalesce in the empyrean.
A butterfly amidst stormbolt sky.
In the heart of every mortal.
I am the kernel of I am.
Asterius
I choke on my shame,
curse my mother’s love.
Better to have only known the cold.
Clutching my labrys, I lie slain—
weapon in hand, never raised in wrath.
Once, I glimpsed the heavens;
now, ceiling is my sky.
I die as I have lived—entombed,
though my eyes were never closed.
These winding halls become my prison—
an impossible enigma,
my home.
At first, I thought my slayer a phantom,
a trick of the dark sent from on high to haunt me.
But he is real—my butcher, my release.
My hecatomb for Zeus’s offering.
Did he fear it too,
stepping into my slaughterhouse?
His light traced a monstrous marionette.
He seemed to shiver—
tangled in string, no retreat.
The torches of the twenty-one victims,
then the one victor,
are the last new things I shall ever see.
Monsters die alone, in shadow.
Heroes fall in light.
Unyoked. Unbroken.
My labrys at hand, double-sided,
humanity in my malformed heart—
a demigod in all but name.
though my eyes were never closed.
I charge death’s horn.
Caged Halcyon
Halcyon, somber bird,
born in a cage of restless winds,
walls unseen but felt in every shudder.
You are the stillness within the storm’s spinning top,
a fragile axis trembling beneath waves that fold and unfold,
cradling you in their endless collapse.
The winds have turned against you—
you were never built to bear them.
So sleep now, feathered flicker in the gale,
dream of skies unweathered,
of flight unbroken,
of winds that do not wound.
Rest, little bird of the storm,
while the world rages on without you.
Hades, Lord of Death
Beneath the roots of winter’s final frost,
under the mantle of Gaia’s shadow,
lies the realm where sunlight dies.
Here rules Dis, king of the afterlife,
adorned in flecks of golden regalia,
his staff crowned with a vulture’s head.
He sits unseen on a throne of bone,
watching supplicants squirm.
Do not fear eternity—
fear the Furies born of regret;
in their hands, Elysium is weighed.
The land of bliss lies here, above,
rarely populated
by souls who remember to thank it.
But once you descend,
not even Orpheus’s requiem
can call back your shadow.
You will die
countless times
and still fear it.
Hades has watched
individual souls
sit still
for eons. Forgetful Pirithous being one.
Apathy
is death before death.
Better to die in agony
than live undead—
with your irony alloyed with gold,
praying with your final breaths.
Ode to Athena’s Conception
O’ Parthenogenesis—
not seeded, not cradled,
but hammered into being:
warlike, unsexed, armored.
Where does sapience originate?
From the roots of soil or the fracture of stone?
From earth, the olive tree rising,
its form measured, its genus decreed.
Branch becomes spear.
Wisdom did not grow slowly—it breaks the sky open.
Mind, math, matter—
three facets of godhead.
Skull splits like an atom,
bone cracks along Euclid’s line,
gray matter spills into form.
Zeus holds his thunderous brow.
Apollo deduces reason; Dionysus induces intuition.
Then—Athena:
Thirdborn of Zeus, his favourite, his final thought.
No womb—only decree.
Wisdom embodied.
Narcissus’ Echo
An echo on a lake.
Self-love can be sacred—
to know oneself,
the sole thing,
the soul thing.
Echoing unto oblivion.
But love that comes too easily—
is it love at all?
A mirror cannot answer,
an echo is no duet.
Does solipsism drown or dredge?
A lone heartbeat offers no warmth.
The lonely devour communion.
Insight is blind to the outer dark of others.
His conscience tried to warn him.
What self-denial.
Vanity is punishment enough—
pride of borrowed divinity,
blind to fortune’s whim.
New loves unmake us;
selfish love reaffirms the known.
Poor Echo—love’s Doppler.
Laconic Echo.
Heard but never heeded.
A voice lingering in stillness,
a cry that never reaches.
Hello? Hello?
A soul, fading from hell,
echoes back to nothing.
Love should ripple,
not merely repeat.
A reflecting pool is poor company,
always trailing,
like prophecy.
To love oneself
is not to know oneself.
He plunged
into self-reflection,
and the ripples stilled.
His self-image shattered.
Sky merged with water.
One forever submerged.
An echo on a lake.
Endymion’s Dream
A lunatic god cursed him to be—
a shepherd counting sheep
for all time.
Selene never waxes,
nor wanes in love—
hovering near,
even at apogee.
With open orbs,
we dream of endless life,
but fate severs us from this illusion,
leaving only a dreamless dark—
the realizing nightmare.
Endymion does not suffer.
Do not pity him.
He dwells among the forms of dream,
where moonlight pours
like milk
through blind eyes.
It's Selene who carries the burden.
The moon—
blood-blushed with longing—
lays her heart
upon the altar of distance.
Night, the hypnotist,
holds the dreamer
captive in his cave.
What dreams overflow?
What causes him to kick out in his sleep?
Some slumbering Demiurge
stirs within unconscious thought.
The nested dreamlings carry souls.
Do they rebel?
Each night harbors a birth,
and each dawn brings a death.
Dreams return in infinite loops,
spinning in the silence of sleep.
The moon is but stone,
yet its heart glows.
Without day’s gold,
its silver would fade into nothing.
The man in the moon is cold;
time blankets him in dust.
He speaks in his sleep,
but the void is silent.
The love of his dreams lingers,
held within the gravity of longing.
When time is done,
the moon will fall out of love,
and none will remain to dream of him.
In his sleep, he drifts between life and death.
But If he ever wakes,
he will learn what the moon already knows—
the loss of life and death.
Cronus, The Timekeeper
There is the time of mind,
then that of matter.
Cronus is the lord of both.
Saturn is a time machine.
The sundial’s shadow drifts near constant.
The dials of other planets
tick at different lengths.
The inner and the outer
are linked by infinitesimal seconds.
Our attention stretches or shrinks them.
From the Elysian fields,
Father Time watches each of our clocks—
out of sync,
occasionally aligning,
superimposed for an instant.
This is where love,
and all human contact, exists—
in those passing moments
we share among the throng of bells,
signaling the strike of the hours.
Within his mind and brain
lies the internal and external clock,
cogged together
by some unknowable substance—
which was there
from the very beginning.
Time is the substance of life and death.
It contains both worlds.
Above and below.
Fear and hope.
Agnostos Theos
Before Chaos there was nothing.
It swallowed all and became the egg.
This was the first god.
It is the substrate of Gaia and Ouranos.
That never erodes or falls.
The field divinity upon which other gods were made.
It will be the last.
I know not what comes after nothing.
Perhaps it never goes away.
I pray to this no-thing.
May it birth our universe anew.
But have mercy in its recreation.
-- Theodore Holmes is an independent writer and amateur myth enthusiast. This is his first published work.