Far off
In one of the many havens of Lord Poseidon's many seas.
Lived a man, eyes stitched silver,
With a silky screen built to filter
the blood red bark of trees
The greens of sprawling fields
And the blue of an ocean that never yields

Humbled by a curse
By offense to the universe
Today, he wanders a digital world
And longs for the days when color curled
From his brush onto canvas

You see,
Many stories ago, lived a painter, Keen Eyed Kazio,
Son of ignoble standings, battered by beer powered, familial, faithful fists
He learned to languish in fatal feelings
A fabled phoenix he emerged, from the ashes of his faceless father’s death.

Keen Eyed Kazio
A muse blessed mortal Moved to paint perception with his pain,
Proffered from a pillaged childhood
He stood, as stoically as he could
A hero, with respect to gain

Keen Eyed Kazio
With eyes of the clearest skies Emboldened to peer through reality’s guise
A paintbrush as the mighty sword against enemy upstarts
Canvases of love brushed honor, hope and hearts.

And so, under washbasin skies,
The nine mesmerizing muses meandered down from the glorious, gold embossed Olympus.
The painter longed to sketch out their effervescent elegance,
the long, lines of their brightly colored gowns,
to the asymmetry of their crowns of delicate, bronze hair.

“Keen Eyed Kazio,” spoke the vaulted, vibrant voice:
Calliope, goddess of winding, epic tales.
“You have been commissioned by the gods to paint three wanderless windows into the world of mortal strife.
If the task is completed with talent: a tenacious telescope made for divine eyes,
You will become the tenth and final muse.”

“The manliest muse,” Thalia, the muse of comedy, interjected.

The muses tittered, their laugh like clinging bells in spring showers

“You will join our rare ranks:
a brother to the daughters of Lord Zeus, and Lady Mnemosyne.
You will be the muse of the visual arts. You will be the muse of the painters, the drawers, the engravers, the photographers, the filmmakers, the graphic designers, and the printmakers.
You will be praised from the countless corners and curves of this Earth.
As the sacred summer solstice dawns in a hundred years time, we will collect you again as your eyes silver and screens beckon.”

The Keen Eyed Kazio straightened his arched back, like a bowed canvas.
His voice spoke out, confident and courageous,
a gazelle declaring his intentions to the lions,
“No less than transcendent excellence will they receive upon their gilded thrones.
With my brush, I will surpass mother Gaia, and be your tenth muse: masterful and masculine.”

The mesmerizing muses’s metallic hair glimmered as they faded from the Keen Eyes of Kazio.

Keen Eyed
he orchestrated conflict, wars twirling beneath his thumbs.
Misplaced motives, greed, a punctured pride and humans
Sunk into the throes of fists, guns and agony.

And so
beset upon a blissful balcony
As war worried and thrashed below his feet
And Death swam up like a wry perfume
Keen Eyed Kazio smoothed his sights
Utensil in hand to chisel the scene in everlasting river of
Time distorted and scissored, like snowflakes creating
Bubbles of lost days
Consumed, he created continental creativity
Countless canvases flew from fiery fatal flaws
Of pontificating perfection in the beholder.
His brush smeared onto canvas with fervor, with feat, with fantastical fury.
The Keen Eyed Kazio resembled a broken skeleton wandering around a funeral:
a whirling vortex of vigor.

When finished
reality and fantasy appeared inseparable,
as history’s painter unleashed his newest addition:
a beaming battlefield, not belittled by queasy qualms.
And so, the Keen Eyed Kazio continued courageously.
Many times, he was wounded as the misplaced spear sparrowed from the fight as a bird flutters from the nest.

A child
Once clinged onto his leg as he fell into fanatical flight,
paint freckling her heart shaped face:
The golden haired girl
He didn’t notice her until night fell, and the lagging weight presented herself.
Her body soaked in crimson, ruby liquid like a velvet coat, shaking in unintelligible grief.
Kazio swooped the golden haired girl in his arms, the canvas forgotten.
He pressed her for grevious wounds, when none were found, he held her until the quaking quelled.
Then, he found her a home in the rising world of the West.

Every five years
he would journey to visit the golden haired girl.
Bringing her the rare canvas of a blooming flower, a grinning child,
or a slippery sunset, sailing below sacred mountains.

In five thousand jaunts of Apollo’s chariot,
the girl gave a gift to the Keen Sighted Kazio as his worn body dragged to the doorstep of the golden haired girl.
It was a thin black box, shiny like obsidian plating.
Kazio flipped it over to reveal the shining silver of Hera’s crown.

“A phone,” she instructed him,
pulling him by the curve of his arm.
Her fingers skated upon the inky screen, drawing magic beneath her fingertips.
The Keen Eyed Kazio keeled in wonder.
His head knelt down, his heart unstitched for all the gods to see.
“She is a demigod?” he wondered aloud, anger possessed him,
“why then, did no god claim her?”
He watched her manipulate the screen. “Hecate perhaps.”
“Magic,” Kazio whispered in awe.

The golden-haired girl laughed
“No Father. Technology.”
She took his haunted hands, and pressed them to the screen.
Kazio with his eyes of the bluest skies, watched as the pictures danced beneath his touch.
He sunk further into the floor, drawing the screen with him.
His swipes messy and unintelligent.
The girl wrapped her arms around his shoulders,
gently she guided him through his stupefaction for the screen.

Confidently and carelessly
he manifested his passion for the shimmering screen.
He discovered the camera, and the applications that could transform them, painting, games…
Kazio ravaged the app store.
He spent his seldom cash upon all sorts of silver screens, slicing himself a cocoon.
Kazio discovered wieldless websites and typed with topographical intensity.
He spent mindless, numbing, solitary hours locked into a world of his own creation
A relief from the constant deluge was incomprehensible to him.
The Keen Eyed Kazio was no longer Keen Eyed as the thrall of the screen beguiled him.
Forgotten were his paintings, patiently performing for nobody.

And as the summer solstice simmered and surrounded him,
the mesmerizing muses marched from the grounds of Olympus to Kazio.
“After a hundred years time, we are here to collect you once more to the shimmering halls of Olympus. Are you ready, prodigious son of ignoble birth?”
Kazio made sure shock didn’t show on his now pale skin. “Yes, of course, marvelous muses.” He now possessed the too broad smile of a swindler.
Then pressing the shadow of love onto the golden-haired girl’s tanned cheek, he faded away with the muses to the gold and marble palaces from Olympus.

The beautiful bronze fountains
filtering crystal like water, fields of brilliant, all-consuming green, palaces soaring into the horizon.
But the once Keen Eyed Kazio kept his eyes on his silky screen.
On route to the grandiose gallery of the gods. If he gazed upwards,
he would see Zeus and Hera, in thrones facing the doors.
Then the male Olympians’ to Zeus’s left and the female Olympians’ to Hera’s right.
The muses proceeded forward, her gowns swaying like soft Southern winds.

Kazio, desperate to defeat
the last level of the gladiator game on which he was gripped.
His bygone keen eyes lost to the tantalizing tickle of technology.
And in a slip of time, his feet tipped and his body tumbled, falling to the floor.
As if spiders crawled across his screen, cracks webbed and wove. 
And Kazio’s sky blue eyes peered up at the gods.

Zeus stood,
the sound of the lightning clashing rung in Kazio’s ears.
“Daughters, nine muses, this is what you brought us. Your candidate for the tenth muse,
a mortal who will not look up, not pay respect, not fall to his knees,
in front of the Twelve Gods of Olympus,
instead chooses his device over the divine.
How dare he not bask in our glory,
how dare he disrespect the mighty hall of the gods,
rulers of the universe.”

The sly goddess, Athena, spoke up,
“A punishment is in order to lash him for his lack of respect.
If he wishes to only look at his screen, then so be it.
From this day forth, till the end of time, he shall only see his precious screen.
Never again shall he see the rosy cheeks of his adopted daughter, or the sliver of sun shattering the silver sky or the vivacious hues of his paintings.
Never again, shall he paint from his eyes, but his memory…
a fading nostalgia for what he once saw.”

Kazio was serenaded by agony,
as slowly the screen in his hand weaved itself into the
Fabric of his eyes, subtle scars of silver crisscrossing his irises.
Kazio fumbled his arms out in front of him, like a child struggling to stand.

All Kazio could smell
was the pungent echo of the sea,
And the faint sound of crashing waves as his gun trodden ears grappled to take in his horizon. The palpable presence of the gods had disappeared.
And Kazio was left to his lonesome

At first, it was not a curse to Kazio
As he spent oblivious days in devotion without interruption to the screen in his eyes
But then loneliness seized him,
An all-consuming, blatant beast that even Kazio could see

A pounding ache to see
To take in the world with two eyes
Under no digital disguise
To see the world he once saw
A perpetual palette for his canvas
A swirling whirlpool of flying, vibrant colors
The grieving eyes of his golden haired girl

Throughout the circular days of eternity
Kazio, submerged in a torturous intense longing
For his keen eyes
Until now, the thousandth sun dawned
He gripped his wooden paintbrush and plunged it into the silky screen of his eyes
as Odysseus to Polyphemus
As a hero to his fatal flaw
As a man to a desperate father
As a painter to a world he would never see again.