Medieval Parkour

I tried to parkour in the Middle Ages and things did not go well.

I parkoured off the mandolin mid-strum, shattering the song,
knocking the bard off his chair, and igniting the ire
of the ale-swilling brutes supposedly being entertained
by the tedious ballad of the white-bearded minstrel
in this cultureless tavern I’d been wanting to parkour in
all night but hadn’t out of fear of how these yokels would react
to the embodiment of an artform they’d scarcely understand.
Predictably, they captured me and poked me with daggers
and pikes while I tried to explain the beauty of parkour
through gurgles of blood: “You bandits! You savages!
Why can’t you appreciate interesting fusions
of artistic and athletic excellence like parkour!
I hope you all suffer a series of bloody, centuries-long holy wars!”
Then I spat blood and expired. They tossed my dead body
out of the back of the tavern, where, ironically,
I bounced gracefully, efficiently down the stony slopes
before landing with a watery scrunch in the shallows
of a brook that ran behind the town and was its sewer.
One thug grunted, “Now there’s a pretty parkour, eh?”
and his illiterate accomplices guffawed rather raucously
as the waters bulldozed my body away downstream, my peasant’s
clothing catching on snags, my entrails leaking into the cattails,
my flesh being nibbled to ribbons by ravenous carp.

My remains are ghost-white when they’re finally flushed into
the lake at the edge of the town into which the brook dumps.
Wisps of dark fluid trail my orifices, and bugs have feasted
my eyes away and made nests for their broods of my nostrils.
Weeks later, among the reeds at this lake’s edge, I am discovered
by a nun bathing further down by a small waterfall
that drains the lake into the underground aqueduct
that squirts out into the sea a hundred miles away. This novitiate sees 
my body first, bobbing on the shoreline, but doesn’t grasp
what I am because my head is missing. That’s when she’s
drawn by my exposed skull, alone in the falls themselves
wedged against a rock among gouts of pounding whitewater.
My bony grimace gives her a fright that for the rest of her life
traverses the pathways of her dreams. In days to come this nun is unable
to banish the memory of our meeting from her reflections.
The more fervently she prays, the more her mind Christianizes
the meaning of my skull being endlessly buffeted
by falling waters into a surreal recapitulation of the baptismal rite.
A few more prayer sessions like this, and my gruesome countenance
morphs into an uncanny comfort for the nun
and ultimately becomes a source of religious inspiration.

A thousand years later, people paint paintings of it
and write poems about it, though none of these artworks
have anything to do with anything I loved or believed in
(parkour), they merely employ the iconography of my demise
to trumpet redemption and other such things
that every vainglorious idiot loves to hear.
A thousand years after that, even this glib mimeograph
of my legacy will have faded from cultural circulation.
By then, my impact on events will have altogether ceased,
the currents of history which preceded me having creased
around me to resume their pursuit of the unknown destination
toward which they had been flowing before I was born.
The minor eddy I represent becoming endlessly less evident
the longer it goes on, the world, until the world as it is
and the world as it would’ve been had I not parkoured
off that bard’s mandolin are remembered into one.