._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,
_,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,.
,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._

To sit and sadly feed yourself with simulated wonder.
To ask a broken brother: Are you holding it together?

Such banquets are for wolves of men, and lycanthropic things —
ever-contrite with juice of lamb between their mangled, gnashing teeth —
whose paper-locket love affairs with absolution cry:
Don’t fall asleep before the weathervane! Adultery’s for kids.
while cardboard rabbits bound like shuttlecocks, all obloquy and force,
and crews of skeletons descend the spire: the parapets unmanned.

The beau unwomaned, loosed and lost becomes a travesty of beau
where southern belles — in rank — cajole him for to lick their torrid boots,
when he just wants to taste their cooking. Then the gravity reclines
as pinball chords progress with wingless aviation to the place
between dichotomies of moon and sense… and chickens, looking up,
announce the story’s gonna fall upon the fable-writer’s tense.

So all the suffixes of prostitutes turn tricks for mere cashews,
and every boater begs the ochre: Can’t we hurry this along?

_,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,.
,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._
._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,._,

Haligh, haligh, an awful lie! — you said we had a spare,
and now we’re twelve miles out from Svalbard in a sinking red canoe,
and had the Jordan greeted Hazrat Isa’s craft with half the chill
then good Hypatia’s endometrium might line our gilded age.

Now pass the fishing line! Don’t dally, for I have to lose this toe
before the Dunning-Kruger dispatch crosses hairs with twelve o’clock;
before calamity arrives, to take me where I wanna go;
before my knees grow nails, and peg themselves upon the Kentish Knock!

I loved the fair with false regard… but never played within that funhouse
where those centenarians bred behind their banner-towels of rue,
and stuck the daughters of their daughters with the task of draining bedsores.
Now the Arctic meets its maker, as I’m coddled down below!

Then Her dominion realigns itself with referential longings —
where the trumpets sound polemical, the gardens grow grotesque —
but deconstructed into springs and strains, the withered axiom sings:
All opposition is illusion, girl! Now take thy second breath.

Behold: the dogs in their casinos bid their gods to play at dead,
as milkwood’s timberline I crest.