A Letter To Satan
Poetry by Fil Swirski
Timeless The world sees yet another
goblin. Another insect scurries
toward you, its tentacles, now fangs,
stripped of colour, poised to suckle
on your entrails. Slowly. Gently. You
are mother. Surly beast. You lavish on
meat, rest only when the opalescent
brittleness of bone smiles upon you.
Smile back, you devil. All teeth intact:
molars, canines; the wise and corroded
cheeks so pink. Hairline perfect
without sign of age. Time holds you
not, fierce lord. I remember: “better
to reign in hell than serve in heav’n”.
War waged in every circle of your domain,
its tendrils trap minor angels,
hapless under your suffocating gaze.
Oh dark lord, liberate the human
race from duality. For millennia, at
once eternity and flicker of your being,
you’ve been doomed to lose. Yes,
you’ve had triumphs. But please! With
all foibles and follies of our kind, so few
have succumbed to your infernal grandeur.
So few have devoted themselves
to your perpetual pain. They say Christ
has suffered! A trifle, mere hours! No,
you suffer, and shall, on battlegrounds
you cannot win. But there is a way, oh
dark and merciless one! Steer the human
race to unbelief. A sacrifice to you,
the greatest defeat to the almighty. Let
our kind deny your existence, and his
existence. Steer us to our own solitary
selves. Feed us books, ideas, images of
sparkling beauty. But do so in disguise.
Don’t let us know it’s you. Stealth be
your weapon, deceit your way. Those
are merely tricks of yore, and belong to
you. You cannot win on the open field.
Be a terrorist and cast doubt on existence.
Do so skillfully, for we are a capricious
kind. Decentralize our place in
the world. Make us small, insignificant.
Let us ‘discover’ the earth as lonely
rock, the body as flesh in decay, the soul
as electric current. Physics and biology,
we shall call it. You know already, oh
divine hatred. We shall doubt existence
of history. Your history. And history of
the almighty and omnipotent goodness
that it claims to be. You cannot prevail, so why enter the war? Without belief in either you or
the divine, we shall perish, out of reach, incapable of entering paradise or the infernal fires of
your abode. If the almighty seeks to save, deny him, though it is denied to you. For we will
remain in the eternal abyss of our disbelief. Droves shall be seduced, more so if their lives are
unencumbered by toil of physical suffering. Cowards at the quick, physical pain our kind fears
most. Only loneliness and boredom loom nearby. So make your move.
Your faithless