Go Braves. Go jump in a lake. Go hard.

Go hide. Go down with a case of.

Go ape. Go without. Go Patriots.

Go halves. Go slow. Go under the knife.

Go under the sign of the war-shaft.

Go one better. Go great guns.

Go south. Go out in the midday sun.

Go red. Go blond. Go Vandals.

Go tell it on the mountain. Go and sin

no more. Go compare. Go nuclear.

Go back to E7 from E8. Go paperless.

Go Cowboys. Go Redskins. Go naked.

Go to ground. Go ahead. Go abroad.

Go to grass. Go slack. Go all ironic.

Go down in a blaze of. Go Titans.

Go for the sake of. Go Saints.

Go fly a kite. Go against. Go gaga.

Go in peace to love and serve the.

Go and get help. Go directly to jail.

Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.

Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.

Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.

Go into detail. Go for the throat.

The Mark

In the Capitoline Museum

After that Etruscan she-wolf

tenting milk-fat twins, the grabby

cherubs added fairly awkwardly

around the time of Michelangelo,

we chance upon Marsyas, nearly dead.

Boxer’s nose. Cow’s lick. The arms tied

overhead are plain white marble,

as is the face, the beard, the gallows;

a petrified tree with prettified leaves.

The torso, though, is pavonazzetto;

the thin pink veins of which evince

a body, stripped of its skin.

*

Books tell you the Dorian mode

employed to worship Apollo

found its expression on lyres –

which the Phrygians refused,

preferring the music produced

by the reed-flutes cut from

the banks of the Marsyas River.

Though the death is not symbolic;

all pain’s non-fictional,

based on the true story of pain.

Nature is precise in this.

It hurts as much as it’s worth.

*

Also Apollo, the racist, cheated,

and the narrative’s loaded by Greeks

who’d chosen the Dorian mode.

This is just the first triumph of the state

and the death of a human flautist,

whose large head is tilted forwards

and whose face bears such a dread expression

it served Renaissance painters as a template

for their crucifixion scenes – forgetting

of course that Christ sides with Apollo,

with all good sons of fractious gods

intent on implementing father’s will.

*

There was the child who thought the darkness

in the branches was some stag that had got

its horns entangled, and thrashed itself in

deeper, to exhaustion and protracted death,

or someone from the town come

outside the walls to draw a tally line

beneath accounts for good this time,

but then he recognized him by

his substantial beard, the solid build,

and when the rug of flies shook out

he understood that all the skin

had been torn from him by some animal.

*

And since it predicts redress, is dilute with

the largesse of the much better informed,

the grief of Christ is inauthentic.

This is not. Marsyas only dropped in