The strangers sat
before the king,
their lips were flat
and eyes were ringed.
It was smoky in that
enormous room,
the vapors and gases
being ornaments hanging in the air.
"For what purpose were you there?"
asked the savage king,
whose eyes were darkly burning
in a face deeply sinking
in on itself.
With feathers in his hair
and paint dried on his skin,
he floated in the air
far above his kin.
Cortes knew the power
hidden deep within this man,
though alien in the hour
of this,
a continent's last stand.
With hands as white as snow
so deft so quick so sly
the contract was unknown
to that great man in the sky.
"To see and meet and greet you,
O' great man of this
strange
and foreign land."
Their eyes had locked in place,
two triggers pulled back taut,
waiting to erase
what the other sought.
Be it gold or riches or
love or power or fame or
ivory coated witches
that were taught no shame,
the two titans did not know
the immensity of the moment,
the branching of the seed
from the future calmly planted.
The trees now grow so far
they cover up the room
where two great conquerors once sparred
while destruction darkly loomed.
A storm gathered on the horizon,
thundering like drums,
winds strong like poison
greed as fast as guns.
They say the smoke still lingers
in all the old, pervasive places,
and that the forest still has fingers
in all the empty spaces.