The Last King of Scotland


The Last King of Scotland

The Apocalypse

happened,

and God decided that

now everything would float.

Nothing on this

whole planet

would have much weight,

most especially not

the fundament or Man’s

situation.

Trespasses against gravity

would be

decriminalized.  

On the 178th day 

of levitation,

Edinburgh Castle—with its storied

walls, moss, and unacknowledged

basement skeletons—passed ominously

over Entebbe Airport, 

totally disregarding

airspace regulations

and confounding three balaclava-wearing

men who glided up its ramparts

like wuxia rapscallions

and made frantic attempts to find

a control room.  

It reached Kampala,

and soon afterwards

became embroiled in

its 27th siege,

which was initiated by a native

son insistent on calling himself

Dada

as though he were the

elemental manifestation

of 

the world’s burgeoning absurdity.  

(In fact, Dada was a man

of several well-constructed identities,

and the ghosts of his dead names

haunted foggy village greens far away

along with

nearer makeshift

barrows.)

Artillery pieces were

perched

delicately

on top of trees

that clung tenuously to an upwardly mobile landscape,

branches

stripped bare of fruit to give rest

to both

revenants of British science 

who might be watching from above

and 

the distended bellies of local mutineers.

When the order was given 

to fire,

trajectories and declinations

were

unsure of their place 

in such an

evolving scene

and struggled with the prospect of going

full pariah.

On a forum existing at the quantum level—

or in God’s brain, same difference—

superstition discourse fought

science discourse

fought Love Radio discourse from a guy named “Kijambiya”

who despised math and digits and said that they

should have departed with the L̅X̅ Asians who

decided to beat feet

for some reason.

The only thing that mattered, though,

was the resulting

explosion,

which tore rifts between 

slabs of rock

and

terrain

and 

the brain hemispheres of those gathered.

Ancient divisions along 

clan (or was it ethnic?

or was it ley?)

lines “are now insignificant,

mostly,” Dada said

during the victory celebration

he hosted in the Great Hall

at a table

that was

ostensibly round, 

but 4-dimensional if you squinted.

Kakwas sat on one side

talking Pan-Africanism with Macleods

and McCullochs roosted on another, splitting wives

with the Congolese because

the melting pot’s stew always tastes better

when it’s stirred

with a claymore.

In his fashionable splice of tartan,

battle dress uniform

and bathrobe—covered 

in medals

that clacked

more than they clicked—Dada

started to

lament that he

was kind of the 

Gaston of 

the ball

as the atmosphere disintegrated

and people got too familiar,

too harmonized

and it

became hard to

breathe.  

He was troubled 

by his own fading.

Out he floated,

down steps that were hardly connected 

to anything

across a nostalgic hundred meter hallway

and deep down into

the castle’s core

of

fractal rock,

a solitudinous place

where he decided that he could be

free from

the wide-eyed denizens

who let the hands of

preying foreign sodomites

move them.

Dada surrounded himself

with suits of shining

armor,

donning bits and pieces

that fit his big-boned frame 

while bidding the rest

to orbit

him

in substitutiary locomotion

as he, King in

this new stronghold,

drafted plans

to supplant

Earth’s gravitational 

pull

with his 

own mojo, 

which he reasoned was expanding as fast as the universe

(and if you just carry the “1 …).

Occasionally, bullets that he

didn’t recognize would

inch through his de facto

throne room

at the pace of snails

crossing blades with impunity,

an annoyance

he commanded

an unoccupied William Wallace

to deal with

ruthlessly.

With the shells in his

pocket, consolidating

power became

joke.  

As periods of sunshine flickered by,

advisors did come and go

with faces

that sometimes made sense

and agendas that rarely did

until one infinite day,

when everything finally revolved around 

Him, He 

apologized for the 

levity.