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@ 27.055 MHz: Ad Astra; In The Tombs Of Dead BoyWhores, In The Time Of Imperator Antoninus Pius
. . . also those whom no one remembers,
Who perished as if they never existed;
And they died as if they had not been born . . .
---LXX Wisdom of Sirach 44:9
". . . sunt lacrimae rerum et mentum mortalia tangunt."
---Vergil, The Aeneid, I
An old man now; and to some of them, a lover.
who had given them, living, shelter and cover;
affection, sometimes a bath, and always a meal---
that they might, for a short instance, feel
as if they---as much of any of us---mattered;
not like fallen leaves by chilling windstorms scattered.
He gathered their dead bodies---some diseased
unto a slow, excruciating death;
some assaulted, brutally beaten until the very breath
had been crushed out of them; and some who displeased
(too often) clients or pimps, proprietors and masters
the fastidious for whom small errors become disasters
who give way to the torrent of internal strife
and not the least hesitant to snuff out a helpless life.
He gently gathered their dead bodies and carried
them on a creaking, mulepulled cart through back streets
(though sometimes scorned, spat upon, harassed, and harried
by those who are high, towering, in their own conceits:
boywhores---from Antioch, Alexandria, and even Rome's
precincts---conveyed with silent respect and buried
in the shadowed corridors and niches of the Catacombs.
We called him the Collector of Sluts (meant good-naturedly;
and cheerful bantering of that sort almost always presumes
tolerance, at least). He died very old; then taken to the tombs
of those fools who believed, as he did, upon Christianity.
Starward
