I wrote this piece while fresh out of university, seemingly unemployable, angry and sad. I was working at a venue cafe/bar and sometimes for a catering company, both zero hours. We'd just moved to Bristol. I had so little money, and way too much time on my hands. I have edited it here and there for readability, but have kept a lot of it as this is what I was feeling then, no matter how silly it is to read back all these years later.
(April 2024)
Emperor’s Last Wish
Through the condensation,
I see him stood still, too still in that room.
Oh my boy, my son’s son,
What hath befallen the house.
I wander the palace
With my robe open and my crown gone
My mumblings echo around me.
2017: I’m earning less than minimum
to keep payments up
water TV
electric rent
gas tax
to keep living in this mouldy flat,
the books mouldy, the woodwork, clothes,
shoes, plants. The corners green and puffy
The kitchen, an expanded cupboard.
the air ripe with moisture and spores.
Eyes are peeling from screens.
The palace is cold; outside it snows
But here no fires are lit. I know nothing of the Empire
(never had one)
my advisers and cohort are in flight
(23, masters degree, sit around all day)
don’t answer the phone,
barely wash. Can feel
my back curl over and in
on itself, a snails shell building
for me to hide my digestion in.
Mouth cannot fathom
Conversation.
Perhaps it is I who
Lurks in the freezing palace, listening
To the Emperors bare feet slap pathetically
On the marble and stone.
No jobs, barely a plight of career.
I look back on my diaries in youth
And to the unrealised dreams and futures around me.
Had such dreams, destined now to grow into
An old man heating a can of ravioli alone in a boarding
house.*
Even that old man must have a blade for this emperor endling?
Mad with incestual nobility, his fingernails long and
varnished
His body scarred with many idle and odd habits
Despite it all, despite everything,
Out there the farms grow
Small things find shelter in woods
And deep animals bray and buck
Strange, odd, despite it all.
2017: never been to America
can’t speak no languages.
Feel myself getting paler day-by-day
The Emperor hasn’t spoken in weeks.
Today I have seen the sun rise and set
From the pearl light of the main room window.
Car horns, reversing tones, seagulls, bicycle brakes,
sirens.
The Emperor can’t find the exit
And even if he could he’d be lost
In his rotten, unattended gardens. He never sleeps, merely
fumbles in fugue and delirium.
23… People my age have sailed the world
and invented life saving devices.
5 years ago 18. Big dreams burst hard, slow.
Since August I’ve killed time wishing I were dead.
The Emperor’s best knights have smithed their swords into
plows
Their armour to spades, their shields to barrows,
Their warcries to coos and trills over their children
And calls to the sheep dog, the hunts dog,
And the calming ‘woah’ to horse and cattle.
Court jesters and servants have become tyrannical barons
Swollen on the wealth made from stolen palace jewellery.
I cannot make next months rent; I sell all but a pair
Of my shoes, all my books.
I somehow know, despite his incoherence,
That the Emperor has a final wish.
Strange to think this is the same Emperor
Whose mother stood like iron and traded
With all the Empire’s strange and alien neighbours,
making sense with councils and senates
while she harboured cannon and spears in the borderlands.
Strange to think I haven’t left the house all day
I know what I need. My hands need to meet soil. Take root.
Or give myself to ophiocordycepts unilateralis
Or lencochloridium, to be proved finally useful, nutritious,
Sustainable. The Emperor’s old knights step out their homes
in
The first frosts of autumn, see their breaths, and feel
good.
Good harvests are soon to come. Great migrations have
occurred,
Across mountains, across seas. They are looking for peace.
I moved from the coast back West. I need the sea, to give
My world a full stop; the tide line an assuring stitch.
Woods retake old fields of wheat, consuming the hedgerows.
The Emperor has not made it outside;
Hear him gasp and struggle,
Slips on the hem of his robe, wriggles on the floor,
Long talon nails bend, splintering yellow and brittle as
they are.
I sleep and wake with no difference;
Like a damp candle I treasure little energy.
The Emperor, his fluttering mouth blinking,
His raving eyes screaming,
Finds me in the throne room (he has made a full circle)
Where I await him with his mother’s sword.
I know his final wish as I know my own, and
Here I am, in impossibility,
Eager to meet it.
Cotham, Bristol 2017
*Line taken from a Noah Van Sciver diary comic.
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