Breath wearing thin the accents of a tongue which has
wandered many places, a vagrant love of one’s lost innocence
embracing the embraceless thing for which no language has a
name, to explain it is to take from this experience
more than what’s worth describing, to make of impatient strangers
an instant audience, to floor them with a glimpse from

which they cannot peel their linoleum gaze, a dropping of
jaws in place of an applause, to sink when singing
assuredly of submerged subtlety without first hearing its motive for
being so obscure, to strain what no note can sustain,
swollen vases shaping secrets with resonance ring into necks emaciated
lyrics meaty lungs string up into speech, pain breaks the

amanuensis within, fatigued from scribbling on our hearts universal laws
we can’t hear or follow when we aren’t listening, bed-ridden
by lust’s bidding, flaws doing us in whenever we stray
from ritualizing it and try to rationalize broken skin, spirit
biting through cherry lips, pitting kisses against flesh, to escape
these prisons of living, clenched fists relent to teach us

to police the nuances, to open up and offer acceptance
as a gift to them when faded deities deign to
receive us in the dim-lit corridors of our selective collective
memory, former ages forever nameless contain multitudes ultra-modern electric truths
undo with subversive politics, dawn’s violence blinding to blankness history’s
pages erases all traces of fabrication, denying legends their pedestals

by shining light onto made-up faces, wiping from the fabulous
their indebtedness to fabulation, restoring to their proper province exiled
storytellers, after the answer comes the question, sacramental intensity blistering
its whisper’s silver-backed passage through a parting of cereal grasses,
aping the pathos of the tragic, laughing, any gnashing of
teeth powerless against this stinging apiary of his, this work

of B.’s, the current enacting a ferocious reaction of æsthetic
rebels attacking the dread conventional by laughing at their own
reflections, famine igniting lightning to Saturnine survivalism, sparkling wit eating
wholesale its usually piecemeal victims, analysis enticing as it flashes
past us, sonorous as a city’s working-class chorus waking to
the brilliance of an angered sea swallowing every last one

of its inhabitants for having transgressed his unspoken need to
be stroked when the world’s ego is sound asleep, burning
Uranian urges brood where Neptune consumes dead dreams, regret wearing
the mantle of retrospect resembles a scythe it cannot handle,
moves past bedrooms beyond where thought can follow, unable to
cut through this sinewy intensity, to break the polari-ty of

the Omertà scene, to sever its ropes of synchronicity or
cross the threshold perverse ambiguity ambles over with fugitive ease,
idiosyncratic amulets handled with silk sigh in my grip when
I find my proper place in time, attrition condescending to
rhythm methodical until all-at-once we together suffer the milk cure
which comes from the centre of my spine, only then

can we look down our guns and put down surrepetitious
offenders with silence, and for once, with eyes closed at
rest, glimpse each other contented, neither knowing nor needing a
better way to explain this feeling filling the hole where
my heart was, warmth hitting the spot like a target,
desire no longer a disaster, desire no longer a disaster.