They say the rust colored earth of Crete are the dried tears of some long abandoned god who wept blood at our forgetfullness. The barren soil of our homeland found us poor and hungry, and thus she gave up her bones so that we might buy what scraps we could to keep ourselves fed. To toil, dig, and sell what we could to buy what we need, and to take the rest. It was all we could do.

After hundreds of years, we have kept ourselves fed.

An empire, we call ourselves - our whims stretch across three fifths of the known world, with ships and fire and blood in our wake.

We no longer toil for what we need, we need but demand and take what we want. And for what?

We are still a starving people - not necessarily for grain or water or other nourishment for the body, but for nourishment for the soul.

It was said, during the starving times, that the elders would flood the air with music and stories to fill the empty stomachs of the children. Captivating tales and entrancing sounds to calm the pangs of hunger as we put our young to sleep. Now with our bellies full and our ambitions burning, it is our souls that starve and our hearts that hunger for the nourishment that once filled the air of our hungry streets.

What good is money, power, and glory? They are but means to an end for us to grasp who we are - the answers to how but not to who or why.
Like my brothers of old, I will set out with a ship and fires of my own to take and forge what we now truely need - culture.

The songs of the past are largely lost to us now but I'll know them when I hear it.
I am the DREAD POET ROBERTO, AND I WILL PAINT OUR STORIES ANEW WITH MY GUNS AS MY BRUSH AND THE SKIES AS MY CANVAS.

The Elders have granted me an audience to hear what they ended up calling 'a fools errand' and a 'waste of a perfectly good ship.'
Nevertheless, my late father's blood-brother has granted me commission of an aging gunboat so long as I fill it with a crew of my own. Not many Cretans share my concerns for the spiritual starvation of our people - but as fate would have it, there are just enough.

We've set off late yesterday, on our newly commissioned ship named after the patron of the arts and crafts and learning - though Ricardo says it would be in poor taste to call our new home the 'Quetzalcōātl,' and so we've kept it as the DTR-CNS>Coatl so as to honor the god but not incite his wrath with our hubris.

We caught an ALG 5k hauler full of Uranium today. I've heard that the Rheinlanders have good songs of their own, so we demanded it from them.

We encountered a Coalition Hegemon full of Synth Paste and Fertilizers in Omega 41. Curious to experience their songs and literature, we asked first for a haiku - but being met only with discourteous silence and some strange dead language.

Understanding that the Coalition standards of education may be of inferior quality, we lowered expectations and requested a rhyming couplet to which the response was more poorly written disrespect.

In the hopes of creating a more beautiful world, we blasted the benighted artless simpletons and went about our way.

The Elders did not appreciate my warnings,

"Roberto, mi niño... You cannot fill empty stomachs or quench parched lips with words. Abandon this foolishness, our people hunger and thirst for tangible things."

But what could I do? Ignore the spiritual, cultural starvation of my blood? What man could turn away from a craving for meaning and beauty far sharper than any pangs of hunger from want of some bread?

"Capitán Roberto, señor, we have no spoils of war to send to our families. Please, reconsider this fools errand and let us grow fat with plunder."

Pearls before swine. They could not appreciate the world of the word - what sincerity and hope has a grain of gold? What loss could iridium possibly know? I crave meaning beyond that of the flesh. I hunger for it.

My crew did not. My family did not. My elders did not.

So I cast my old self behind in search of something new.

- - -

Our bounty has been great thus far,
Life closed one door and left one ajar.





So we'll continue on our prowl for word,
Those who do not give will recieve our sword.

Be sure to tell all,
Roberto the Dread Poet,
Shall come for you next.

Another trader crossing the void of space,
his holds full of Iridium but mind on gold.

Perhaps his words lacked a certain grace,
but a good faith effort spared him the cold.

Today we accosted a curious barge,
And demanded art of the one in charge.

Unexpected yet joyous happenstance,
led us to a keyboarder-singer quite advanced.

A man of letters,
Trawlin' Delta for science,
hum'bly offer'd thus:


And a corsair stopped by,
He really did try,
And that's all that mattered to us.