Diotima

Wake, nurse your aching brow
The cloud behind your eyes
For now, soothed by gentle thoughts
Of oblivion and sexual release
Inside every man is a beast
A perfect animal of self-advancement
Unthethered by conscience

Beyond the realm of will
While the living self fragments into quanta
Is this the next step?
Minds disolved in the aether
A split species

"Diotima, your sun, the more beautiful age
Has gone down
And now the storms quarrel
In frost-covered night"
Grant us the power of detachment
That our fragmented selves will know purpose
Ethereal love, spirit sense
Of which the physical can only intimate
Freedom from this flesh
That I may observe the balance of nature

"Till what's cleft in two become one
In the mortal heart
Till ancient human nature, so calm, so great
Serenely and powerfully rise
From out of our seething times"

"Heal her life, O' Gods
A life that you yourselves raised"
So she may merge our splintering selves
The physical and the ideal"

"For not everything is in the power of the Gods
And Mortals would sooner turn into the abyss
Each day I shall give my cinders to your flame
And rise up another man"