Tear him for his bad verses

It’s been the better part of a year since I last wrote a fannish sonnet; high time for another one, right?

So there’s a community called unkindestslash which has made it its mission to collect fic of all possible pairings in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. (It also implies in the user info that there’s a rivalry between Julius Caesar fandom and Antony and Cleopatra fandom, which is adorable, and, I suspect, false.) This is my contribution; the pairing is Cinna the Poet/Cinna the Conspirator:

But mightier than these, both pen and sword—
Though you may make Rome’s streets run red with blood
And I, with one precisely chosen word,
Can float your name untouched above the flood—
Is time, but not the blind, remorseless foe
Who crushes all beneath his sandaled feet
Inevitable as empire, and as slow
For in the end, the race goes to the fleet.
No pen is quick enough to catch your breath
The way it catches quick against my skin;
No dagger’s keen enough to deal the death
That, in the dying moment, dies again:
Each one a Rubicon. The die is cast,
And, worse than senseless, slips into the past.