Caduceus 

In this story, you are the messenger of the gods,
Your left hand not knowing where your right hand lives,
What is a snake more than underbelly?
I do not live by omissions, by secret, in shadow,
I do not live where I cannot be seen
and in this story, there is no resurrection in the darkness.
What if nothing ever comes to light?
I have a theory that goes something like this:
That which wraps itself around the staff
will eventually get entangled, too.
It’s all a matter of waiting, possibly even
2,500 years in the making.
In this story I have my suspicions
About attention-seeking, about what it means
to traverse the borderlands in search of
about what the boundary between intimacies
contain. It is the year of the pathetic man, after all,
according to National Public Radio
but are there podcasts for psychopomps
in the underworld?
In this story, you listen diligently as an undercurrent
to negotiation, here between gods
a secret third thing, a stasis, a stalemate.
Will you tell the truth this time around?
How, in order to be in the world, you must
be in back of to do some biting, too.