i.

Monstrous necklaces of carnage the body wears, fractured kraters whose • wounds curators have delicately repaired to display as if original, • as if still intact, reconstructed pieces of peace museums tease • together, offering glimpses, enticing depictions, of war’s ravages restored to • wrinkled simulacra of ancient grace, antic hay laid like palms • on the brow in an Attic haze, dances around the • throats of broken vases awakened by token attention to intricacies • replicas cannot replace, to carry tears burden satyrs and dimple • the player’s field with humid drips of fears to which • experience gives life, how these fauns handle being objectified, commodified, • defiled by admirers whose quest for lost youth occupies too • •

                    ii.

much time to refuse them the hours they buy, deified • if only for a night, apotheosistic Narcissists, a meeting of • flesh with bone, in the yard where earth overflows with • holes fingers fill with doubt, tracing out paths to destinies • through exits no one knows, doors in the floor opening • as do mouths, nude souls floating, following the sun as • though his warmth were clothes for those whose setting is • an imagined figment, a poetic fragment, lit by a bulb • whose filament dissonant wind blows, bulbs knuckling to surface to • service roles penned by stones, borders of boulders hemming in • older ones than elders now can show reverence for, untoward • •

                    iii.

how the restless dead go powerless to this forge, this • altar beating each season into their forms, a sword of • smoke piercing cloud, slitting throughout the Otherworld their presence known • by sign of tendrils turning about daffodils trampled by ghosts, • an inheritance of scars warring against the darkness, marring with • scars the inside of this coat of flesh, signing sigils • and picturing pressed on these sooted walls of its cavern • within shadowed handprints, begging spirits, imprisoned poems, fetish ornaments • of choke-held hearts flying about as do birds whose songs • fill singing bowls, warming vessels to full boil, each cavity • is a brothel, a recalcitrant stronghold suited to swallow into • •

                    iv.

every waiting hollow vacant echo after echo seeking vacancy to • greet its own, arms opened, embracing repose, how into the • grandeur of overgrown ground mine goes, about as cracked as • that allure those satyrs of old had to endure, transformative • voice transfigured by the enormity of a tragic word over-performed • for a deaf world, shirtless on sherds potters turn to • shovels in this yard, fitting into its pores defixiones repurposed • to work their own curses, whisper after whisper which courses • toward the first favoured boy whose first mister the myth • of a love which would live forever ill-flavoured, soured until • it burned, whose warning goes on unheard, repeated ad nauseam.