“The Virtues of the Throne”

This poem was directly inspired by the Sanskrit text Siṃhāsana Dvātriṃśikā, though it’s not actually a retelling of it. Translated into English by A.N.D. Haksar as Thirty-Two Tales of the Throne of Vikramaditya, it recounts how an Indian king, Bhoja, finds the throne of Vikramaditya, decorated with statues of thirty-two apsaras who have been turned into stone. Each apsara tells Bhoja a tale of Vikramaditya’s wonderful virtues, in order to show him that he’s not worthy of sitting on the throne.

The stories themselves get a bit repetitive over time, and of course they’re all intensely moralizing — but I loved the general concept of the setup. And so was born this poem, which takes place in a secondary world and concerns a king who is not Vikramaditya, but still has the nymphs of the throne telling a new king what’s required for him to sit upon it. For reasons I can’t recall and probably just boil down to instinct, I wrote it as what’s called a “nonce poem”: one that doesn’t follow the rules of an existing form, but sets its own rules to follow within the poem itself. The result is very deliberately musical, and so I have sold it to 4LPH4NUM3R1C (aka Alphanumeric), where you can read it or listen to me do so myself!