release comes as a direct consequence of Anton's beloved nature. “Good guys finish first,” the poet mutters. “The good die young, innocent.”
The poet has merely acted as catalyst, freeing poor young Anton Pierre from his ugly prison, this vile existence wherein one's own body is infested by vermin.
The Lord Poet of Misspent Time, Anton had called him. “I like the sound of it, no matter its meaning. Meaning takes second place to musicality these days anyway, so… In any event, the label will be kept, and deservedly so.”
A return to the bedroom to stare at the dying boy. Genuine pride in having helped liberate naive, innocent, young Anton from this filth-ridden world fills Anton's benefactor. “I feel great compassion for you, boy.” His benefactor kneels over Anton and speaks softly in his ear, taking the boy's naked body in his arms. “Who else fights today for human dignity? I'm engaged in a war here, an all-out, fucking cosmic battle. A war between all darkness and all beings of light, and the stakes are high, Anton, absolute in fact. The whole fucking universe is at stake.”
The poet begins to gently rock the dying white form in his arms, tears streaming now. The boy's skin seems as white as an albino's, as unblemished as fine porcelain. The poet's tears stain the boy's forehead here where Anton's body is held close and rocked. “You'll become a warrior for good, Anton. You are needed elsewhere.”
A siren wails somewhere out over Philadelphia's nightscape, disturbing the peace of Anton's last moments. “I'm guilty of caring too deeply, too abidingly,” the poet says to the near-empty, lethargic shell that had been Anton Pierre, wondering what the boy's real name might have been, and then wondering if it mattered what he called himself. The boy's soul is yet slipping off to become one of the legion to whom the poet answers. “I believe in the actions I take; I believe in the forces driving me, forces that speak through me, act through me, use me and my poetic genius. I am a mere humble pawn in this flawed world of impurities.”
A shudder erupts from some final, volcanic center inside Anton Pierre's thin, white body. The poet lifts Anton's head and gazes into his dying eyes, bringing the young man's final pure light to his own eyes, and there shines resigned acceptance in the dimming orbs, and the angels dancing over Anton's irises smile at their messenger poet. The angels are pleased, pleased at finally finding and embracing Anton Pierre. “Go-go on angel's wings, dear, sweet youth,” mutters Anton's poet.
Helpless, yet in smiling reverie, his veins circulating the poison that formed the very words of the poem on his back, Pierre groans the groan of the warm and comforted feline, feeling no pain, completely happy in a pure and beneficent embrace now. With the virtuous poet sponsoring him, the virtuous angels welcoming him into their legion, Anton becomes the chaste chosen.
Yes, the poet cares so much and knows much. In fact, the poet has learned a great deal from his otherworldly tutors. Thorough and meticulous, they have filled his mind with all the knowledge of those who have spoken through him since childhood. Through the World Wide Web, they now have come to reveal themselves and to help target the chosen, and the work has been rewarding, for they have assured him a place among them, and they have said what he has done makes him a true man in every sense of the word.
The poet has heard them speak it even as they revealed their identities. Enticing dark friends from beyond are those same entities he converses with in his dream and reverie.
He had assured Anton Pierre that he, Anton, ought to have been born an angel, or at least a saint. So lovely and gorgeous is-yes, is-he, for he lives now and forever…
Yes, the poet cares far too damned much. He simply loves too deeply and too well, certainly too passionately, but then no one knows of the true depths of his passions, not really. Certainly no one knows the depth of his involvement with young Anton Pierre, here tonight.
Lovely thought, lonely reality, he thinks, for no one can share in the beatific work, the calling. The poet wonders if Byron, Shelley, Keats, and other inspired poets had not been called to perform such miracles in their day. If so, perhaps Byron alone acted on the choices offered him. Did Byron hear the same voices?
“No one not hearing the voices could possibly understand; no one not hearing and feeling himself directed by the angelic spirits surrounding the poet could know the depth of the connection. They guide the poet's every movement and breath.”
Anton lets out a long, languishing burst of air.
“Yes, of course, that is it,” the poet mutters, and the dying Anton Pierre, whose eyes glaze over with his slow passing, responds with an angelic smile.
“A final toast,” the poet bellows out, “to that other world which you're moving toward, Anton, I promise you.”
Anton's angelic, startled reply is telepathic, speaking of stunned and amazed innocence at what he now sees. The poet hears Anton's voice inside his head telepathically sending a message: “And I love you, too, my beautiful poet friend, and you will reap the reward of pure love for freeing me from this, our shared purgatory.”
The poet loves Anton Pierre, far more than any of the boy's blood relatives, who detest him for his difference, for being a woman born to a man's body. Even given the brevity of his and Pierre's encounter, which fate has brought to them, the Lord Poet believes he loves the youth far more than any who called Anton friend, certainly more than his current lover, Tom, who has hurt him so deeply and so often. Tom's reward, his punishment, will be to live out a full life in this realm of the putrid, where the spirit is corrupted with the body.
From what the poet has gathered, Pierre had recently been hurt for the umpteenth time by family, by so- called friends, and by Tom. Well, no more… no more pain or suffering ever again. Michael, Raphael, and the other angels have seen to that-with a little help from a poet whose soul belongs to them.
He has helped Pierre flee from this world for the most passionate of reasons. He cannot allow the Anton Pierres of this world to suffer. He sits now with Pierre while the young man's life wanes, the life force now like a flickering wisp of moon-glow.
The poet holds on to the young man's hand, so like a glove now, a sheath for the sword of soul.
The body is a simple vessel, a mere repository for spirit.
He weighs time. A light on the horizon from the open window, a cool breeze tickling Pierre's fevered brow at the moment between darkness and dawn, a special moment when the ethereal creatures come to take their own.
The Lord Poet of Misspent Time recalls the lines he has penned on Anton Pierre's back. The poem honors Anton, as it is meant as much for the boy's memory, his sepulchre, as for the masses who will learn from it.
“Or will they?” the poet laments.
With the boy's head in his lap, brushing fingers through his hair, the poet recites aloud the poem to his loving Anton for a final time:
Chance… whose desire is to have a meeting with stunned innocence…
A flickering with every heartbeat born is a picture burned into skin a little story wherein ends illusion.
The cut of it against my back marks time in distances wide, the time it takes to retell a new breath.
Anton Pierre's eyes roll back in his head, fully dilated, the poison having done its work. It will be a killer difficult to detect, and it creates in the boy a peaceful end, now that the initial convulsions have passed. The poet holds the young man's head in his hands, rolls him facedown, and places him gently on the pillow on the floor. The poet next covers the marked boy with a sheet up to his waist, leaving the poem revealed to those who find the body. He next kisses his cheek and bids farewell.
“Safe crossing, my sweet friend,” he softly coos, locating the door and quietly leaving the apartment.
He leaves the building, unseen save for a homeless man who pays him little mind. He steps out onto the wet shimmering bricks of a newly gentrified neighborhood, where cheap pavement meets expensive stone, the renovated warehouse courtyard silent and slick with a summer shower that futilely attempts to wash this world clean.
A mewing cat from the alleyway abandons her search of a garbage heap to follow the Lord Poet of Misspent Time, whose left hand carries a valise, the tools of his trade. It's as if the cat wishes to be his next protegee, begging him to skin her and scrawl a poem across her back and send her over to… to some cat heaven. He ignores the animal. Still, the poet's soft-soled steps from this place are like a cat's, like the fog of Carl Sandburg's poem that “comes on little cat feet,” and he thinks of J. Alfred Prufrock, the eponymous hero of poet T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and he wonders who knew first, the poet or the creation. And which of the two was more real, Prufrock or Eliot, the poet. Which of the two saw the world for what it is, and which of the two did something about it. As I have done this night, he thinks.
