A Caffeine Ache & Talks with Cicero - An Iambic Blankverse

The fan keeps reeling 

Round and round

Within my line of sight.

The bolt, perhaps, is coming loose,

The motion not so steady as it ought to be.

And what a shame if blackened blades,

Its mount and all,

Came crashing downward to

Disturb the books 

That rest beneath its guard.

I cannot ascertain 

Which figure I purport to be

While watching life go forth before my eyes

And draining down 

A stiff Americano in its wake:

Am I a haughty Damocles,

Reclining smugly on a throne

Of wonder and of knowledge, far

Too lofty for my ego to accept?

Or is my countenance lock-step

With weathered Dionysus who,

With knowing of the danger of his post,

Rebuked his very soul 

With sharpened and unsteady monument,

His heavy garland witness to the threat

That hung on horse's hair?

Now, did this tyrant king

Foretell the smirking youth

Would look up to the sky

And feel so suddenly 

His heartbeat screeching to a halt

As such a gravity there gripped his eyes?

And had the young man figured out

His own misgivings of a higher place

And, once obtained, 

Was weighed in mad respect

To those who came before him thus?

Could both of them have felt,

Within a flashing blink,

The same defining revelation there,

By which the fates revealed:

That standing on the pedestal

Of clay in pure esteem by fellow man

Is also formed from iron jeers and jests,

And such an office held

Both crucifies the humbler man

And frees the savage beast?

And there the grandest battle is,

And all such conflicts fall in line with this:

What will the virtuous and upright man

Prepare himself to do in fog of war,

And which tools will he choose to sharpen thus,

And which tools will he choose to stow away?

And what is being fought for in the end:

A life of glory here on Earth,

Where pleasures may be found but quickly fade,

Or peace in simple joys while bodies breathe,

And longing for a Kingdom far beyond?