Emperor of Antarctica

The world is turning, turning, turning
Everyone is spinning, spinning, spinning.
Waves are rollling, rolling, breaking
Icebergs collapsing, snows avalanching
Find me at the South Pole where
I'm not really moving much.

It's cold and frigid here, and mostly lonely
The penguins, the emperors and their eggs, huddling
dwell way too close to the shore
Ex ovo omnio. Ovid.
The few geologists I can muster here
Are way too much of a bore

Mr Amundsen and R.F Scott
once duelled for this vast expanse
But Antarctica with its shrinking icecaps
wouldn't be owned
not even by Eskimos.
There are none here.
just listless torpor.
people already loved
missed by letters
but only wanting instead
to be understood
if not by men
then by snows.

The packed snow breeds dreams of food, warm fire, even home
shivering, humming Beatles tunes in a sleeping bag
delusions of grandeur: "I am the Emperor of Antarctica"
The dunes of snow are my domain
Apart from that not much else
not mosquitoes that fear the cold.
To kill the grinning walrus
"Who is he anyway?"
just stains the powdery canvas
with impressionistic crimson
like a young girl murdered by a pickaxe
in very very cold blood.
smells of rancid butter
it will do as a rug.

Just me and these other boys with dreams
who looked out too many windows on starry nights
watching clocks, waiting to be found
sailors bitter hardened by the sea.
tormented by the beauty that afflicts us all

like this neverending land
reflecting the orange sun
glooming over the horizon
just like an old western
but no aubades found here
and riding into sunsets
only gets you lost.

Me, I just hated air-conditioning bills,
the place I came from, everything I loved.
That's why I came to freeze on these moiraines
tan in the ozone hole
dump myself in some freezer
where it's forever cold.