Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith
The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968)

Strange things happen If you stay
The devil will catch you anyway
He’ll seek you here he’ll seek you there
The devil will seek you everywhere.
Gun. Race with the Devil (1968)

“The Devil”, they say, “gets all the best songs”. He also gets a good few stories, in the form of “biographies” both scholarly and light-hearted and novels and movies that range from allegory to fantasy, depicting him the personification of evil or as a clever and entertaining trickster. In some, he is the ageless hornèd one, and in others, he is just plain horny – I’m thinking here of Jack Nicholson’s scene-stealing performance in the 1987 adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, all wicked grins, lecherous asides and comedic menace.That’s actually one of the better films in a catalogue of cinematic corn that features Satan, to use another of his many names, in person, through a proxy or in psychic proximity to an endangered mortal soul.

Closer to home, my friend and budding author John Rosley, published a novella called A Touch of Sulphur before he passed on in 2022. Its narrator, an incarnated Satan, boasts about his achievements on earth. He has strong and politically incorrect views, particularly regarding the Catholic Church and its clergy whom he regards as his bitterest enemies, ripe for degradation in ways only a devil may invent. I hope that his story, available on Kindle via Amazon, didn’t cause him too many problems when he arrived at Saint Peter’s Gate and knocked on Heaven’s Door.

In the interest of balance, I must note that there been plenty of books written about the old fellow’s nemesis and arch-adversary – including those claimed to have been written by or on behalf of himself. The Almighty, Our Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Big Hughie, and more. There are, as Muslims rightly aver, a thousand names for God. Many contemporary scholars have penned biographies, and so has another friend of mine. This I actually proof-read, but it remains to this day unpublished.

The following, however, is a contemplation of Lucifer, biblical bête noir and literary anti-hero (he, like God goes by a multitude of monikers, but I like Lucifer best). It leans more to light-hearted than to outer darkness and neither scholarly nor theological, it is slightly iconoclastic, and, I hope, informative and entertaining. It describes my long and enduring artistic relationship with the “great tempter”, a literary fancy rather than some kind of weird bond with the evil one – neither amoral, immoral nor menacing, but more like a muse.

And …

It all began with Christopher Marlowe 

Dr Faustus. Was not that Lucifer an angel once?
Mephistopheles. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God.
Faust. How comes it then that he is Prince of Devils?
Meph. O, by aspiring pride and insolence,
For which God threw him from the face of heaven.
Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer?
Meph. Unhappy spirits that live with Lucifer,
Conspired against our God with Lucifer,
And are for ever damned with Lucifer.
Faust. Where are you damned?
Meph. In hell.
Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of D. Faustus

That was Kit Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who gave us the story of Doctor Faust, the ambitious alchemist who “sold his soul to the Devil” – a salty tale taken up centuries later by German poet Friedrich Goethe and French composer Charles Gounod. His play is best known for his description of the legendary Helen of Troy as “the face that launched a thousand ships”: Marlowe may not have been the first to give us Faust, and nor was he to be the last. German polymath and write Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe took him in the early nineteenth century as did French composer Charles Gounod in 1859: a wonderful opera with a fabulous “soldiers’ chorus”. German author Thomas Mann published Doctor Faustus in 1947 wherein a gifted composer strikes a “Faustian bargain” for creative genius. These tales always end badly, their protagonists forgetting the maxim that those who sup with the devil should use a long spoon.

As for Marlowe, this sixteenth century “rake and rambling boy”, alleged bisexual and also government secret agent, was also an accomplished playwright, recognized as one of the most accomplished in a crowded Elizabethan field, and a master of blank verse – it’s still called “Marlowe’s mighty line”. In the perennial debate about whether or the Bard of Avon wrote the plays attributed to him, Marlowe’s name pops up as one of the prime candidates. A bit of a cruiser, a bit of a bruiser, he died in a tavern brawl in Deptford, southeast London.

It was through Marlowe that I first made a literary acquaintance with Lucifer – back in Moseley Grammar School in the mid-sixties when Kit got himself on to our A Level syllabus, and though one of our set plays was Edward II, the sad tale of a conflicted and controversial king, we were encouraged to read some of his plays. And I’ve always remembered the following exquisite demonstration of his “mighty line” as the medieval Mongol conqueror Amir Tamburlane grieves for his dying wife:

Black is the beauty of the brightest day;
The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire,
That danc’d with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflam’d his beams;
And all with faintness, and for foul disgrace,
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.

Zenocrate, that gave him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory brows,
And temper’d every soul with lively heat,
Now by the malice of the angry skies,
Whose jealousy admits no second mate,
Draws in the comfort of her latest breath,
All dazzled with the hellish mists of death.
Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
As sentinels to warn th’ immortal souls
To entertain divine Zenocrate …

The crystal springs, whose taste illuminates
Refined eyes with an eternal sight,
Like tried silver run through Paradise
To entertain divine Zenocrate:

The cherubins and holy seraphins,
That sing and play before the King of Kings,
Use all their voices and their instruments
To entertain divine Zenocrate;

And, in this sweet and curious harmony,
The god that tunes this music to our souls
Holds out his hand in highest majesty
To entertain divine Zenocrate.

Then let some holy trance convey my thoughts
Up to the palace of th’ empyreal heaven,
That this my life may be as short to me
As are the days of sweet Zenocrate.

But back to Lucifer …

Lucifer and me

I was aware of his bad reputation, of course. Brought up Irish catholic in Birmingham, there was no way that I could’ve missed him – it was always a “him” back then and never “her”, though our childhood was replete with biblical archetypes of amorally lapsed ladies with exotic names like Salome, Delilah, and Jezebel who often had songs, plays or movies written about them. Often, they too were portrayed as “the devil incarnate”. Elvis Presley sang about The devil in Disguise. Cliff Richard whinged about his Devil Woman. Fifties crooner Frankie Laine of High Noon and Rawhide fame sang about his unfaithful girlfriend: “if ever a devil was born without a pair of horns, it was you, Jezebel, it was you!”

That business in the Garden of Eden assured us that it was a woman who had committed the “original sin” and that all women were per se “the root of all evil”. This was when Satan earned his reputation as a tempter (nice apple), deceiver (Adam needn’t know) and liar (God won’t mind), and with it, the tag “Prince of Lies”. The implication was, that, if you fucked up, like evangelist preachers today who are caught with their pants down, “the devil made me do it”.

We were taught that Old Nick, as he was called, was forever lying in wait to divert us from the straight and narrow, and that the holier you were, indefinable though that was, the greater the effort he put into suborning you and the greater the rejoicing in the infernal realms should you stumble and fall. He isn’t alone, mind; look at the vicarious  pleasure we take in seeing the high and mighty brought low by human failings, particularly politicians and clerics who lecture us on old values like family, neighbourliness, decency, courtesy, and self-control.

By coincidence, I was only just listening to The Rest is History podcast about Martin Luther, and Dom and Tom recounted how the Reformation’s progenitor believed the evil one to be intensely real, a clear and present danger. Rantings about Satan were virulent and often quite alimentary, featuring lots of bodily fluids. There is an apocryphal story of how one time, assailed by Satan, Luther threw an inkwell at him. another time, when during an hallucinatory episode, Lucifer appeared to him as a little dog, though an avowed dog-lover, Martin flung unlucky Rover out of the window. A sad case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

But I’d never encountered him represented as an actual person. Until I met Christopher Marlowe in Lower Sixth. Along with Kit, I also met Mephistopheles, a demonic go-between tasked by Lucifer to purchase the soul of the ambitious Dr Faustus. Admittedly, M was merely the middleman, but he gave his crew a bad name and literary fame. 

About the same time, I happened to bump into him at the amazing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery – the magnificent statue of Lucifer that stood imperiously in the centre of the central hall. The winged bronze oversized figure (11 feet tall, weighing in at 2,000kg) is Jacob Epstein’s depiction of the Archangel  Lucifer, inspired by the renowned sculptor’s fascination with John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). It has stood at the heart of the museum, tall, stern and perhaps androgynous, a custodian of the gallery’s collection, an affirmation of the artist’s genius, and its value to the museum.

And so it was that at Moseley Grammar we learned through the unfortunate Faustus that Lucifer was an actual person, and an untrustworthy one at that. A fellow student, whom I did not know too well, and who was in fact one of the few Jewish students, wrote a poem for our school magazine (of which I was one of the editors). I remember but the last stanza (and later in life, used it as the last verse of a song).

But my literary liaison with Lucifer did not end there. Flatting in London in the early seventies, a friend introduced be to Lucifer’s Cage, a fiery instrumental by English guitarist Gordon Giltrap (who, incidentally, grew up in Deptford, the place of Kit Marlowe’s demise). The tune and its title, and that one verse slept in my imagination for decades, until they crystallized in a song.

Lucifer, star of the morning
Lucifer, prince of the night
Lucifer falling through darkness
Lucifer cast from the light.

Lucifer sits in his wasteland
Trapped in the cage of his pride
The sirens of importunate circumstance
Reclining in ranks by his side
Plots he has made, so ingenuous.
Dangerous follies and schemes
For he has stage-managed quite strenuous
Drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.

Lucifer frets in the wasteland
Locked in a pillar of ice
We know of this only to well
We have visited him there once or twice
For his is the language of liars
And his is the honour of thieves
And he is the master of eloquence
As the last of the honest men leaves.

Lucifer crawls from the wasteland
No solace or peace or rest.
For he has corrupted the wisest
And he has co-opted the best.
And all that is good has since vanished
And with it, the fair and the true
And the silences hurting his demon heart
Are haunting, haunting you.

And the road that winds out of Meggido
Is the path that leads to the pit
For Lucifer prizes a web of disguises
He merely selects one to fit.
And the road that runs down to Jericho
Is the path that leads him to you
And the paradox searing his demon soul
Is hunting, hunting you.

So make you no truce with Lucifer
Lucifer of fiery breath
For Lucifer is treachery
And treachery is death.

Lucifer, star of the morning
Lucifer, prince of the night
Lucifer falling through darkness
Lucifer cast from the light.

The “pillar of ice”, by the way, is borrowed from the fourteenth century Italian poet Dante Alighiari’s Inferno. In his account of life after death, the ninth and last of the concentric spheres of hell, is where betrayers and traitors languish.  It is presided over by the man himself, the greatest betrayer of all, though now impotent, encased up to chest in ice, a giant, bat-winged demon with with one head and three faces. Each weeps as it chews on a notorious sinner: Jesus’ betrayer Judas Iscariot, and Julius Caesar’s backstabbers Brutus and Cassius. His wing-beats raise a chill wind that continues to freeze the ice surrounding himself and the other sinners in the Ninth Circle, a wind that is felt throughout the other circles of Hell. In contrast to depictions of the devil in Dante’s day as a cunning foe ever ready to prey on human weakness, his Lucifer is strikingly modern, a metaphor for nothingness. Dribbling and speechless, he is all hat and no horse, or more apposite, all horns and no hellfire.

The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous
From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice …
Consider now how great must be that whole,
Which unto such a part conforms itself.
Were he as fair once, as he now is foul.

Doré’s Dante – Satan in Hell

Jacob Epstein’s Lucifer

Fallen Angels

So who exactly was this Lucifer, the biblical sum of all our fears?

Many Christians, whom I do not profess to be (I gave up practicing when I was good enough), believe that Satan, or “the devil” as he is commonly known, was once upon an eon ago a gorgeous angel much loved by God and named Lucifer – which means “star (or ‘son’) of the morning” – on account of his exemplary luminescence. No wonder early marketing folk got the idea of naming a brand of matches “Lucifers” – a tag memorialized in the First World War song It’s a long way to Tipperary and the soldiers’ trench superstition from the Crimean War to World War II  of “Three on a match”.

He’d got tickets on himself, defied the boss and fell from grace. “Cast out into the Outer Darkness”, in fact. Hence French illustrator Gustave Doré’s striking image of him descending to Earth to fracture a cozy de facto relationship between Adam and Eve, the first human beings, a perfect pair “created in God’s image”, and thereafter to inflict mayhem upon mankind, including, as we have noted above, the concept of “original sin” which broadly defined all humanity as damned until it accepted the dominion of an almighty creator and condemned womankind to an eternity of subjugation to the patriarchy.

This assumption that he is a fallen angel is, scripturally, based the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament of The Bible: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations” (14:12).

But the tabloid story that has been handed down to us through the ages arguably originated in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, written sometime between 300-100 BCE and quite popular around the time of Jesus. It was widely circulated although it was considered a heretical text by the religious authorities on account of its opposition to mainstream Rabbinical Judaism. Whilst referenced a few times in the New Testament, it was rejected by the ecclesiastical canon, (though not, apparently, in Ethiopia – to this day, a unique African outlier to Christianity, and indeed, Judaism). But it’s from Enoch that we’ve inherited most of our mythology of the fallen angels, and also, a lot of apocalyptic imagery and millenarian or “end times” belief. 

The apocalyptic Book of Enoch gave names to the Sons of God – Lucifer and his comrades, and also, a mob called the Nephilim. The eponymous Enoch understood them to be fallen angels who, having fallen to Earth, had sex with human women – beautifully portrayed in Daniel Chester French’s sculpture, which has been described as the sexiest statue in Washington DC. God, naturally, punished them, and, their behaviour, it is said, in Noah’s flood.  So, it would seem, the fall of the angels related more to sexual sin than to Lucifer’s pride.

The Sons of God Saw the Daughters of Men That They Were Fair.

An artist made a sculpture of Lucifer that was too hot for the church so it commissioned his brother. He made an even hotter one!

Regarding the above picture, a Facebook comment read: “The depiction of Lucifer on the right looks exactly like the one in my dream.  I dreamt that I was in very dark hallway or corridor and suddenly the room lit up, not a very divine bright light but more like a very dim light, lit enough to see what was going on. There was this huge very tall, partially robed angel in crimson red. He raised his hands in the air, and when he did, blood exploded out of the walls. It scared the shit out of me. I jumped up out of bed and didn’t go back sleep until the next day. Satan is definitely real, and he isn’t a red goat with horns – he’s a very tall, nice-looking angel with wavy blonde hair – and very very powerful he has wavy blonde hair sort of like Logan Paul’s (an American social media influencer, professional wrestler, YouTuber, entrepreneur, and actor). Though this may sound silly or fun,  I’m not joking. I’ve I seen this m…..f…..r in my dream! It was Lucifer!”

Paradise lost

The story of the fall of Lucifer is actually underpinned by not one but two works of fiction: Enoch’s, and the English puritan poet and pamphleteer John Milton’s imaginative and lyrical masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667) which has dominated our perspective of the story ever since.

Milton gave us the first lyrically and psychologically compelling portrait of Lucifer. He was not the sly predator of myth and menace but rather, (initially, at least) an edgy seductive hero. With his fine words, theatricality and swagger, the only ostensible sign of evil within, a lightning scar on his face: “He above the rest, in shape and gesture proudly eminent, stood like a tow’r”. And yet, he winds up as a washed out up idealist and revanchist cynic, “dismay mixt with obdurate pride and steadfast hate”.

Although I was familiar with Paradise Lost, I did not read Milton’s prose opus until the late seventies, encouraged by the the work of nineteenth century French lithographer Gustave Doré who rendered the poet’s words into pictorial flesh. That’s his iconic image of Lucifer descending to Earth at the head of this story.

Sometime in the early eighties, 83 or 84 I think, my old pal and provocateur Yuri the Storyteller introduced me to Lilith.

Lilith has been around for thousands of years. In the Talmud, she is described as a winged demoness with a human appearance. She appears in the bible, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in Hebrew folklore, and has been mentioned in black magic treatises. The apocryphal story is that Lilith was Adam’s first wife. God made Adam from dirt and clay. Adam bored, requested a companion, and God obliged with Lilith. Legend has it that her dirt was dirtier than Adam’s, but put that down to patriarchal prejudice and propaganda. More likely, she had the dirt on him! But I digress. Apparently, Lilith was not as inferior to Adam as he wanted. She wanted to be her own person, not Adam’s wife-slave. The story is that when Adam insisted on the missionary position, Lilith refused, saying “Why must I lie beneath you? We are both equal. We come from the same earth”. Adam got mad, and Lilith took off.

Because of this, she was banished from Eden and became a spirit associated with the seductive side of a woman. Eve came in her place to stand behind Adam, not beside him. Lilith became the timeless femme fatale, preying on the easily tempted weaker sex, the fabled incubus who comes at night upon men as they sleep. It is not for nothing that she has been hailed the (informal) goddess of wet dreams.

The legends are many and various. If you buy into the Lilith theory, you will see her cropping up throughout history in a variety of guises. In biblical times: Delilah, Salome, and Potophar’s wife. In fact and fable: Sheherazade, Lucrezia Borgia, Mata Hari, Evita Peron. Hollywood’s screen ‘sirens’ like Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. All of them antitheses to secular saints like Eve, Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Jackie Onassis, Mother Theresa, and Princess Diana.

Lilith’s story deserved an epic poem, so borrowing from Milton and the opening chapter of JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion, I duly wrote Lilith – a poem of the fall. It was attributed to a Roman poet celebrated during the reigns of emperors Claudius and Nero. It’s forward read:

“The style of Lilith differs markedly from that of other poems attributed to Meniscus – most notably the Hebrew Heroes cycle and was evidently written for a different manner of presentation. It was most likely written to be recited rather than sang (as were his other “story songs”). Recitations were a common form of entertainment in the middle Roman period, owing their popularity to the enduring reputations of the “classical” writers of the time, Ovid, Horace and the like. It was not uncommon for such recitations to last several hours. But Meniscus, mindful of the fast-moving times, and also of the attention span of his audiences, appears to have honed his pieces down to between ten or fifteen minutes”.

It debuted at Victoria’s Port Fairy Folk Festival in about 1986 in a shambolic busy poetry competition – it came first, I recall, but the event was so poorly organized that I received neither award or recognition.


It began in suitably histrionic Genesis style:

Long time ago In a time before time,
When man was an atom in primeval slime,
When darkness lay hard on the face of the deep,
God called for his angels to sing him to sleep.

I hadn’t finished with Lucifer, however. He reappeared as metaphor in a gloomy commentary of the state of humanity in Devil’s Work, published in full at the end of this article. The narrative actually came to me in a dream – though this was not the nightmarish image of the sleepless Facebook commenter quoted above:

For what you’ve done to you own kind, you’ve done of your own will.
If I went away on a holiday, you’d be malignant still.
For all you’ve done unto yourselves, you’ve done because you must –
A self-destructive legacy to bring yourselves to dust.
To render you to dust.

The implication here is that we actually know Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, because, to use a an enduring aphorisms, “we have seen the enemy and he is us!”. Many writers have implied this. In 1942, not long after his return to the Anglican faith in which he’d been raised, my favourite poet WH Auden asked a Sunday School class: “Do you know what the Devil looks like? The Devil looks like me.” As an informative piece in The Daily Beast observed, “his sensitivity and acuity as a poet made him aware that the pathologies of ideology are first manifest in the pathologies of individuals, including and especially himself, a character he never shied from satirizing or indeed using as a template for the doomed romantic or cruel authoritarian he took as the protagonist of so many of his poems”.

And finally,Lucifer is also name checked in a sprawling ballad about Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab and his obsessive hunt for Moby-Dick, the famous white whale:

Down, down, deep down we dove
In a tangle of rigging and rage –
Down to the deep where the dead sailors sleep
In the darkness of Lucifer’s cage.
From Chapter Forty One – In That Howling Infinite 

A brief satanography

The following is an updated version in the introduction to Roman Holiday: The Poems of Meniscus Diabetes (1989). Most of it is compiled from Wikipedia.

‘Satanic’ implies the old God-Satan contradiction – and yet it is a paradox. You can’t really have the idea of a universal, omnipotent a God AND a universal, quite potent black hat opposing both Him and Man.

Indeed, we tend to anthropomorphize Old Nick more than we do his rival and nemesis God, although Jesus and Satan often have their own Fight Club going in the New Testament – the ostensibly “evil one” doesn’t get much of a gig in the Old Testament, which is not to say that Jewish folklore didn’t quite ignore him, as I will explain in eccentric detail below. The Essenes of old, who left us a heap of important written material in caves overlooking the Dead Sea, bought into the idea of a conflict between the spirit Princes of Light (God, and in time, Jesus) and of Darkness (Satan – which might’ve come from the ancient Persian Zoroastrian spirit of light and wisdom, Ahura Mazda (remember the light bulbs back in the day?) the Zoroastrian present day heirs are the persecuted Baha’i of Iran (though their HQ is in Haifa, Israel. Ironic, eh?) and the Parsi in India and Pakistan, a name derived from Farsi, now the language Iran and much of Afghanistan.

Then we have the old Parthian prophet Mani who, according to Wikipedia, sought to synthesize the teachings of most of the faiths in vogue from Europe to China and all places betwixt during the third century CE. He gave us Manichaeism, which teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology that describes a struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. It’s not an optimistic one – through an ongoing historical process, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. The Manicheans believed that God was just, and kind, and loving. He was forgiving God who would forgive us our trespasses. It was the Devil, therefore, who had to be propitiated with prayers and amulets and so on – averting “the Evil Eye”. The Manicheans were accordingly persecuted as heretics at best, and as devil-worshipers at worst.

Lucifer, of course, derived from the Latin, meant “light”. He was, of course, an angel. In angelology – yes, there is indeed such a field of study, angels were, or are, because quite a few folk believe that they are real, God’s bodyguards (assuming he was corporeal) and cops before the Jesuits took over. They are categorised by power, authority and also, light. Lucifer was “top gun”, the bee’s knees, dog’s balls, the primus inter pares. Until he got to big for his wings and staged a rebellion.

There is a downside to doing deals with the devil, unless you’re Robert Johnson at the famous Crossroads, or successfully challenging him to a duel like the young fiddler in The Devil Came Down to Georgia or the likely lad in the old English folk song False Knight on the Road. Look what happened to the ambitious Marlowevian sybarite Doctor Faustus.

The unfortunate Yazidi people of Iraqi Kurdistan and northern Syria, ethnically Kurdish, but an ancient religion in an intolerant sea of Islam, were long accused of being “devil worshippers” because they believe that whilst God is benevolent and will not do us intentional harm, the Devil can be quite malevolent and hence needs propitiating. This was how others perceived it back in the dark day, although more enlightened times have emphasized that the Yezidi Peacock Angel is a beautiful and as benign and benevolent a deity as any other in the deities beloved of the world’s believers.

The Peacock Angel,
 Deviant Art

There was no diabolical god in the Roman and Greek pantheon – or amongst the Norse Gods for that matter. There were gods who did nasty things, but that was because they are annoyed, or angered, or moved to vengeance or malice, or even, envy and lust. These, one placated to restore them to a better humour. Nor is the Satan, the principle of evil personified, actually in the bible. This was a later construct that was read back into it. In the bible according to the poet John in Milton, the devil, whilst not exactly pleasant and delightful, is either on the side of the heavenly authorities at the least, or at the least, not destructively opposed to them. In the words of that great song out of the Brill Building, NYC, “I’m just a boy whose intentions are good. Please don’t let me be misunderstood”.

For other indulgences in In That Howling Infinite. see It’s 3am and an hour of existential angst, Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment and The quiet teatime of the soul

Devil’s Work

I dreamt I fought the Devil and I bound him in strong chains
To answer for our consciences, to blame for mankind’s stains;
For all pain and perversion, crime and atrocity,
I brought the criminal to trial in the name of humanity.
This bane of humanity.

In judgement of the power man who makes us fight his fights,
And the holy men in uniform who trample on our rights;
To exact compensation for his prey alive and dead.
But when I brought him to the dock, this is what he said…
He said: “I had no part on what you say I’ve done to hapless man.
He’s master of his destiny – he does the worst he can.
I did not set the fires that burn – I only tend the flames.
Men forged the swords and lit the brands, wrought carnage my name.
They conquered in my name.

“The tyrants and oppressors who jockey for control,
Are of mankind’s own substance, the product of his soul.
The torturers and murderers – in these, I had no part.
They spring from man’s perverse desires and his infernal heart.
Damn his eternal heart.

“The tyrant is not guilty and the killer has clean hands.
They are but pawns of the soul of man and the fruits of his demands.
One half of mankind does not think, the other does not care –
And the sheep go to the slaughter when the wolf pack leaves the lair.
The wolf has left his lair.

“And I am but an image, a figment of your mind;
I am but the whipping boy your hide your sins behind.
I was here before you came to Earth, I’ll be here when you’re gone.
I don’t ask your forgiveness when you’re deserving none!
My undeserving son.

“For what you’ve done to you own kind, you’ve done of your own will.
If I went away on a holiday, you’d be malignant still.
For all you’ve done unto yourselves, you’ve done because you must –
A self-destructive legacy to bring yourselves to dust.
To render you to dust.

So when you say I want to rule a realm of ash and bones,
Let he who is devoid of sin go cast self-righteous stones.
I stand upon the sidelines, contemptuous, aloof.
I won’t condemn all that you’ve done.
I may condone all that you’ve done.
I’m quite content with what you’ve done. But cause it?
Give me proof!”