Grain Liquor on a Chequerboard

Sissah said to the tyrant

All I have done can

Be paid by a grain of wheat

Placed double on a board

For chessmen, square

By square as your majesty

Deigns, filled row by row

Column by column

Doubled and doubled

And redoubled again

Though your granaries fail

Though the universe fail

Heavy with precision

The tasseled heads nod

Over your honor pledged

All your wealth spilled

Across a child's toy

Tipped over-loaded weighed

With the finite product

Of your vast imperial 

Fruited plains exhausted

And still your word not

Redeemed by the 

Feckless promise of  your

Ignorant imperiousness

So my thirst distilled

From every single grain

Wheat and rye and maize

Through the retorts of

Clever men and the

Art of bourbon-masters

Casked and even

The angels whose share

Spilled by the action of

Wood and wear and 

Time's long march

Through cooper's art

And warehouser's 

Patience and the fat

Fungoidal mass that

Growth from drunkard's

Environmental footprint

Darwinian god's imprint

On the wood of a 

Distillery's backlot.

So I am, so it is

All that thirst and despair

And the joy of a nightly

Drunken haze that kills

The regrets of a million

Wasted fruitless lives

Brown-tinted oceans of

Misery murdered in 

Alcoholic metabolic

Poisons, before the 

Liver reduced before the

Heart ruined before the

Stomach shredded the

Sorrow that murdered the

Rest killed by the hand of

The merciful distiller's 

Daughter, bourbon

Sweet as innocence

Sharp as the morning

Swift as the ending

That brings with it

That final finishing

Hangover which

Hangs over 

Lies of Eternity.

One cannot kill time

Without injuring eternity

Well;
To hell with 

Eternity which gifts us 

This taste of fire that

Burns on the tongue

To mind us of that

Lake of fire before

Our inevitable end.

M. Hagmaier

12/7/14