For a latter-day Victoria, from an embittered and embattled Albert—

                    i.

If they can be taken, let them go,
what others would never dare say I,
however, now will howl, I would not
mind being the prey of your prowl, sewn
together in the throes and twisting

                    ii.

thrust of trouble without terror or
tumult, how the treble of your voice
makes my heart tremble, soothes throughout this
hollow thimble of a muscle more
mettle than I can manage will soon

                    iii.

collapse, this heart, so called, on which I
seem never to get a true handle,
penetrates as a new needle does
a lewd groove beating me to its punch,
low-end bottomed-out, grunge-heavy with

                    iv.

heaven-scent, how your breath fills in whole
what every shout of mine has been
an attempt to kill, knotting stomach
and tying tongue to eclipse my soul’s
raucous call sent to shrill those who doubt

                    v.

I ever willed into existence
this resistance of mine before you
defied it with persistence, defiled
my denial of a shared life, by
silencing my mind, rhyme calming from

                    vi.

inside this tempest of mine, stalling
its eventual, self-evident,
self-effacing decline with a phat,
bad-assed sample of your own genius
gifted gratis and laid atop of

                    vii.

that behind which I hide, walls of sound
dividing into tracks the single
path your panting claws crawl and scratch, to
be the catch of such a wrecker, to
be wrecked hard by her, that cougar, whose

                    viii.

antiheroic deeds myth hails as
a strange remedy, an irony
of cruel comedy to define
divination by retribution,
divine definition of a sin’s

                    ix.

darkly humorous predicament,
a strange situation of ours this
dance has become, two vampires aching
from the setting of the sun on four
lips dripping wishes rumour fulfills.

__________
Notate Bene:
☞ The dedication of the poem is, in fact, to the poet’s Muse, Nadya Ginsburg.