Neanderthal Messiah — 189

Entering Athens’ Elite Neighborhood | -IV

[Plato arrives as Sokrates’ investigative entourage registers the sunrise.]

[Plato:] ‘My wife brought home a baby

From that Spartan mountainside -

But it cries, so I came…Sokrates

What is your method then?’

[The Parthenon was ablaze with morning sun.]

[Sybl is at their far margin on her knees invoking the day.]

…

[Sokrates to Tuition, the Police Chief Slave:] ‘If one of your finest

Arrives at a crime scene

And a child is bleeding — traumatized

Going into shock from an attack

Saying: it’s in there — the dog that mauled me.

Should that officer draw his weapon, and enter?’

[Tuition:] ‘Of course! Armed investigation!’

[Sokrates, now facing back to Plato:] ‘And Plato

You’re that officer & you find 2 dogs within -

A female, puppy, mutt and a male adult saluki.

Xerxes’ peninsular lion killers.’

[Tuition mutters:] ‘Der Rott Weiler.’

[Plato, provoked:] ‘I would kill it!’

[Sokrates:] ‘And so, within the Asexual Movement

That infiltrated my student body — this educated

Anti-Spartan military movement…

The warehouse fire, Youth’s case against his father, slave murder…

The Areopagus now a tribunal disregarding policing

While our polis ethics shift from imparting to taking…

Plato — we seek a Cretan perpetrator

A Philistine rapist among our youth

From within the phalanx.’

…

[Knock-knock-knock — an oak door opens wide.]

‘Is Leonidas in?’

[Sokrates:] ‘Plato, are you familiar with stealthing?’

[His eyes fall on the aide-de-camp’s boot laces, and

Like the scourge of make-up transmitted north from Egypt

Via Crete

His calves were strap-entwined with the fishermen’s knots of Knossos.]