—

To taste their appearance
     while licking an unclean
     mind’s filthy mirror, just
     add an abandoned past
     to a man’s relentless
     present to gift him his
     future, memories bruised
     by Fibonacci whose
     olivaceous eyes failed
                    to see the point of life,

fingered like winter’s wife,
     pimento-sized splinters
     sinistral liberals
     hit inside, appearing
     tasteless when hid in plain
     sight, this polished silver
     tasting of bittersweet
     danger, freighted with raw
     memories, dead flesh that
                    could at any moment

recrudesce, so let us
     labour to row home, throw
     overboard what rumours
     this storm’s mutinous crews
     overheard of us, we
     warriors who, lost, lust
     for dulcineas, whose
     want of anything but
     routine lives lived like stones,
                    Sisyphean boulders

                    ——

kicked back-and-forth like slurred
     palindromes, bones rolled out
     like burnt breakfast oats, souls
     offering to ogres
     our mortality shorn
     to deny our doubts, we
     thread through streams of bottles
     mouths menace, battling bouts
     of brute reality
                    with which we cannot cope,

blurring out dreaded truth’s
     ravenous nudity,
     drinking mistresses’ false
     elixirs in the hope
     that what we want the world
     to see never mimics
     this fantasy’s darker
     choler choking us with
     its leathern ropes of guilt,
                    cola-coloured liquor

wearing out our kind from
     underneath and within,
     so glimpse them, then, those pores
     out of the cavernous
     depravity of which
     an acuity for
     impurity pours, thick
     and viscous, witness what
     your lecherous touch does
                    to desire’s disciples,

                    ———

unleashing forces that
     unbridle Poseidon’s
     horses, trampling victims
     with fictive epics your
     wonder at our exile
     pens, antiheroic
     couplings no lip intends
     to unbed, yet you lick
     wounded lyrics, waking
                    what salts the (gl)ass you rim,

expecting us to sing
     of our conquests so your
     unkind chorus can drink
     in tempest winds, for this
     vicarious wisdom
     other (w)hor(d)es have traded
     more, but for the offer
     of your time there exists
     a type of tale visions
                    b(l)ind themselves to conceal,

a legend whose telling
     only appears when we,
     kings who have seen the deep,
     number among the stars
     names of lovers whose deeds
     we recount with wet tongues
     their milky ways unseal,
     so take up your wine’s bowls
     and face what reflections
                    you hold, filling their holes.