Work Text:
Apollo spins poetry out of thin air, about the mundane and the extraodainary. According to him, there is poetry in everything, in the beautiful and the revolting. Poetry isn't restricted by anything, other than those silencing the poets. Robbing them of autonomy, of education, of nutrients and nurture and of their life. In a much grander way, art is in all and is one of the first to be restricted and bastardized for it's power to defy oppression.
He thinks that there is poetry in the crunching sound of his nose breaking. Pain shoots through his face to the rest of his body, his legs giving out under him. He thinks of every thread that led him here, to this point, his nerve endings firing like a life wire. He thinks it's a particularly heavy handed comparison.
He thinks of a mother kneeling next to her child, kissing their hurt and chasing the pain away. He thinks about the fact, that there is noone here to help him get back up.
How some poems rhyme, and retching on the asphalt reminds him of feeling like throwing up after a particularly harsh training session with Zeus. How every kick to his head or stomp to his stomach indicate the beginning of a new verse. He curls in on himself, hands aching where they try to protect his head from the assault. The repition of something that must not have happened too long ago, curled up in the ground, in pain, trying to protect himself of the agony of being stripped of his immortality. Another rhyme.
He thinks of the parallels of salt water in wounds and the pain mixed with the tears streaming down his face. How losing conciousness and regaining it only moments later, feels like breaking through the surface of a body of water. He wonders if Commodus felt the same when Apollo had drowned him and he had gasped for air, thrashing, fighting to survive.
Looking back, Apollo thinks that there is something tragically poetic about himself mentally begging for his sister to step in and end the assault by their father and him mistaking Meg McCaffrey for his sister, when she steps in and sends those beating him, running.
He's mused this before, but he imagines she'd be able to dismantle Zeus' reign of tyranny all on her own with just a few seeds and her swords on her. One little sapling with so much potential, breaking through asphalt, disturbing the path someone finds themselves on.
Apollo's head aches from being pushed to the ground and kicked over and over again. It feels like a thematic parallel to his fathers voice ringing through his mind "YOUR FAULT, YOUR PUNISHMENT". He does not have the mind to remember if reverberation has a phonetic transcription symbol. If sounds other than vowels can have that little colon "ː", with triangles to lengthen them, following them up. Because the sentence keeps replaying in his mind, the "/t/" not sharp, but never ending.
He wonders if literary academics can find the irony in his fall, no metaphor, no biblical symbolism, but an actual fall from grace. If the feeling of burning alive,
of suffocating, would find it's other half in Apollos desperate attempt to survive.
He wonders if one could derive meaning between art being the first to be policed under facism, for being viewed as other, wretched, rotten, bastardizations of what's acceptable and the first to fall of the Olympian gods being him, one of Zeus' bastard sons. The one that is the god of the beautiful arts, of poetry. The one that kept being pushed over the edge, left to catch himself. If Poseidon had been the second, because the sea doesn't like being restrained, is uncontrollable, a variable Zeus cannot predict. An antithesis to the control Zeus is desperate for.
If Zeus' bastard son is a tautology, if the term "bastard" isn't overdoing it, when being a child of that man already says everything one needs to know about someones conception.
Apollo finds Meg McCaffrey's presence comforting. Maybe because she actually talked to him and didn't immediately resort to beating him, maybe because she was a kid that roamed the streets and he felt her a kindred spirit. He isn't sure, looking back on it, he finds himself wondering if it was desperation or if seeing his sister in Meg had symbolised some form of safety to him. A familiarity. A comparison to the warmth of a hearth or the cadence of someones voice. Something that drew him in, made him curious and drove him to be ready for death, if it meant her safety.
Meg McCaffrey, a sapling deprived of the sun, a sun god desperate for someone to believe in him. In being two sides of the same coin, one bird freed of it's cage, another that returned to it, leaving the door ajar.
Apollo can't help but find poetry in everything, in the beautiful and the revolting. And he may not be able to end Zeus' reign yet, but he can continue to find poetry in all and he can continue making wretched art as an act of resistance.
And maybe he can set the other Olympians on a different path by being like a dandelion breaking through asphalt.
That is, in fact, a simile.