Inside of Us He Died

By Kevin Cahill

 

The massive wooden club he carried with him

was greased with the brains of men and monsters…

and his own children.

A terrible burden.

Whatever else one might say about him,

he had the strength to take it up,

(indeed, he could not put it down)

but there is no silence long enough to unsay

all his sins.

Perhaps that is why his best friends, Phobus and Chiron,

were centaurs. They understood

that he who would rule the world of men

could ill afford to be more than half a man himself.

He cared nothing for his own skin.

For mankind he held apart the heavens and the earth.

Again and again he threw himself before evil

and prayed to be taken,

but it was as if he could not help but live.

By the end, he bore scars and trophies from every continent.

In remote and exotic places he sought atonement

- his guilt carped at his heels

and exhaled from the swampy den of Hydra,

it left tracks on the snowy slopes of Eurymanthus

and crashed through the brush in tusked madness,

it unstopped jars of wine and emptied

entire valleys of human feeling,

it cloaked him darkly in a lion’s skin,

dropped him down on all fours

and roared hoarsely in his ears,

“Please kill me, please!”

Calamity was his life’s labor.

At length there was no place left for him

save to ascend to the top of his own pyre

and ride the searing flames up into yet another darkness

- and so, it is said, that Heracles died

inside of us.