All The Sixes, Six Six Six

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

All considered he was and is an enigma,
The Great Beast Six Six Six or Little Sunshine, he's not at all sure.
After all these years he still roughly models himself
upon a long dead magician with a captivating if ravenous mind,
from someone labelled the wickedest man in the world by the media
or, according to Bowie, a puzzle man who questioned what we're here for
(this is supposedly a free country, so you can take your pick).
And no, I'm not referring to the Bowie who fashioned the knife.

Sometimes the humble student ranks himself a mere Neophyte,
sometimes he rashly raises himself to Ippisimus Major,
it depends on a whole lot of things......

It's an odd thing to do, to lust and love and make changes
with magical intention, the bumbling acolyte muses,
sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously.
But do you have to place your activities under ritual headings?
he asks himself. “And anyway, who are you to attempt to mould reality
and bend the immutable laws of physics?”
After a brief silence, this was his answer.

I was and am a lamb bleating for its lost mamma
and a lion that wants a whole lot more than the kill.
Oh bliss! To be both strong and helpless, predator and prey
carried by the devious currents of chance and intention
to an island uncharted, an unseen jewel of the North Atlantic
that few can share, a paradise of sorts
where only my rules count, for now -
on occasion it's the only way to travel.

I was and am a river of variable depths and contradictory faces,
running cold and running warm, swiftly and oh so slow,
a ruthless torrent or a trickle
monopolising the rapids and placid pools alike.
Gently I guide my current Italian lovely between the rocks
and then drown her a little in my sometimes overpowering otherness.
“Bastardo!” she cries, partly in fear, partly in joy.
It is good to be a satyr and a Saxon, a scholar and a sentimental fool
in the same jumbled package, I think.

I was and am a sorcerer, a twister of time,
a bearer of the magic touch when necessary,
but overall the gentlest of beasts. That, I tell myself, is because
I take my pick from the various trees of knowledge that the world has to offer
and concoct my own truth for all to love me by,
though I wish to control no one.
That's the secret of strong medicine, I smile,
a universal elixir sweetened to the bland taste of the masses,
in the exact same instant a survival tool
and a useful model for the future.
That is all.