The Minotaur in His Maze (after a fragment of Helvius Cinna) by Eric Brown

Waiting, so much waiting,

At the center such stillness,

Wending the same coiled

Passageways, no sounds

But his own steaming nostrils,

Or his axe-blade dragged across

Stone. Even the Cretan rats

Have ceased their squeaks.

The only decor that changes

Is his latest defecation, new stains

Of orange urine variegating

The carved illusions of his maze.

His smell is noisome to himself,

Stale and rancid, tasting iron,

Now that he knows the scents

Of other bodies, young and supple,

Perfumed, oiled in myrrh and

Amber, mouths venting an acrid

Spice, drugs or wine or fear.

Spiraling out, he keeps his strength

Isometrically, with no fell foe left

To test and train his might.

Gone are the florid, fighting days

When Pasiphaë would send him

Some Hyrcanian tigress or brindled

Steer to spar with, after which

He would gnaw the marrowed bones.

Now the heaviness of his weapon

Hardens his hands, his chest, his arms.

And his endless walks, his skull-

Smashing charges into the winding

Walls, his bellering into the dark,

Tighten muscle enough to overcome

The passive guests arriving looped

In ropes, twisting like serpents

Within serpents.

How could he know another existed

Built, crafted, to destroy exactly him?

Educated by the centaur-son of Cronus,

The demi-horse who knew the parts

Atavistic that mix man and beast

In cleaving contradiction. The brutish cunning,

Instinctual murder, the will to destroy

Against one’s will. The parts worse still

That even the monstrous brain recognizes

As monstrous, and so flees from itself

Only to find an abyss of darkness deeper,

The unanswering void, purposeless erasure.

A warrior immersed in those secrets,

Who knew not just the surface gore,

The impaling horns, the appetite

For flesh, but the black mystery

At the insidious center, they would kill

To kill what they could not kill in themselves,

Left to ruminate on the sickness

That united them. As the touch

Of Punic Psyllus hypnotizes

The asp, whose own bite has toxins

Somniferous, so slayers of dragons

Know the mad prompting of devastation.

Hercules laid it bare, cloaking himself

In skin inseparable of Nemean lion.

Who shares the minotaur’s drive

To escape its labyrinthine prison,

Pieced together from the beginning,

With all its dark fissures, its chambers

Within chambers?

Heroes seek their own annihilation

In the monsters they encounter as

Their own abyssal selves. And so it

Goes, on and on, until the hand

Of Theseus has killed so many

Monsters, there is only monster

Remaining, and so no monsters.

That is how it goes for this one:

A winding thread, a sister’s betrayal,

A son of Aegeus in constant training

Against the winded oaf of Cnossus.

A slash of femoral artery, a blade

Inserted through ribcage, then again,

And a flourishing, incessant

Beheading of the bull.