Ballade of the New God

Poetry

Size / / /

Thomas M. Disch

Issue: 30 July 2001

I have decided I'm divine.
Caligula and Nero knew
A godliness akin to mine,
But they are strictly hitherto.
They're dead, and what can dead gods do?
I'm here and now. I'm dynamite.
I'd worship me if I were you.
A new religion starts tonight!

No booze, no pot, no sex, no swine:
I have decreed them all taboo.
My words will be your only wine,
The thought of me your honeydew.
All other thoughts you will eschew.
You'll call yourself a Thomasite
And hymn my praise with loud yahoo.
A new religion starts tonight.

But (you might think) that's asinine!
I'm just as much a god as you.
You may have built yourself a shrine,
But I won't bend my knee. Who
Asked you to be my god? I do,
Who am, as god, divinely right.
Now you must join my retinue:
A new religion starts tonight.

All that I have said is true.
I'm god and you're my acolyte.
Surrender's bliss, I envy you.
A new religion starts tonight.

Reader Comments

Author of over a dozen novels, five story collections, seven volumes of poetry, two books of criticism, and more, Thomas M. Disch has been publishing since the early 1960s. His best-known SF novels are the critically acclaimed Camp Concentration and 334; his book of SF criticism, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, won both the Hugo and Locus awards. He currently splits his time between New York City and his house in upstate New York. For more, visit this fine Web site.

About Thomas M. Disch

Bio to come.

Current Issue

18 May 2026

Fiction

Hymn To Scylla

By: Elena Goh

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve.

Poetry