P.

The wind is coming down in broad sheets, and the pages of rain
Slap against me; the whole world seems to be
Rifling through the book of seasons,
But it can't find what it's seeking
So it thunders and storms. Acharnos,
What excuse can you have to dawdle in this weather?
I have my sheep, my ranging herds, huddled like a balled up clump
Of yarn under yonder cliff, but where's your farm?

A.

Peleon, pull the ragged cusps of your cloak
Closer in to the bristling edges of your neck
And try to smooth the hairs with warmth. This is a time for wolves
And I wouldn't be wandering out so late
Or so lucklessly but for my Ludia. Do you know the tale?

P.

No, but here; let's duck under this tree, see
The long boughs drip with their bounty of rain, but the grasses beneath
Have less than their fair share, just like the farmer who comes before dawn
Gets the brunt of the work to the darkness, but the drunkard
Who wanders in late leaves as early, when his work's barely done; so this indolent grass
Is ripe and richer than the spreading of fur, better for a sit
Than soft sapplings. But with the same congenial air that these leaves,
When the rain leaves off, shaking in the after tremors
Of the earth's soft sigh like a breeze, will disrobe themselves of their thirsted drink
And drip it to the earth that's spare below, so I'll share with you
Honeycakes, a tug of wine, and some of the mealy apples
I've been gathering all morning, the fallen from the trees;
All I ask in return is the news.

Random "Poetry"

When an acrid moon rose
Over the birthing fields
Of gathered piss and compelled many words
To ramble, harvesting of weeds,
While in the long, disgusting lots
Of spilt beer and politics
The wind licked her bloated lips
And rotten apples cored,
The buildings stood
Silently as sentinels
In cool revolt against the sky.

Alencia Speaks!

Dawn, by Alencia Lysander

When I unveiled my entire body to her,
Stripping off the folds of gleaming
Priestly white to reveal the rich and saffron
Hues of golden skin beneath, glowing in multi-layered
Brilliance of rippling muscles
And the scent of lake-fed, cusping herbs

Her blood, you can bet, was boiling
The way your water bubbles when you stir the tea,
Mixing in the crocus and the argent berries, funnelling
The ruby dust of crushed hyacinth so
That the aroma wings up
In the Elysian mists of soup
Like some delicate bird, your drink:

I quenched my blood in the savor of her hot lips: delicate one,
You whose beauty is the wave of ivy wrapping round tree
Of blue pealing souls, dividing from one another ardently to the sky
From their roots, and your limbs are the routes
Of empire, and I have traveled everywhere from the capital to the heart
Like an errant begging for kisses and benediction, and I have kneeled
At your temple; so you transformed my juice into wine,
My veins into masmatic gold, and I feel a new breath rising
Deep from the earth:

There will come the unity of my soul with my brother soul
Across the wide wastes of the ocean that he worships like the setting dawn, and then
We will fly free as the bluebird into the first arch of spring
Through the gleaming horizon that fades in the parallax vertigo of the present
Time; then we will see, all things
Will be renewed, and every voice will blaze up like a living flame, or he'd say
Like the perspiring wicks of the dusk, and I'd say dawn: my prophecy.

Eucharist

The tuning fork, the present guide, the letter
And the question why, stretched like the divining rod
Under a boiling sky
To try for the deep riches of furrowing streams:

Or tell of Moses in the desert, when he struck the rock
Once and the hard resounding of metal,
Twice and the outpour of numinous
Streams, three times and the wrath of my God was upon him
Smoothing the sky into trembling clouds:
Shot bolts from the quiver, and struck him down
Not far from the river of Jordan, but stark across
From the promised land.

Who am I?
I promised it for Abraham like Jason -- the golden fleece --
With milk-whites of honey, and with the dripping of grapes, for juice;
But my nation trod on the husks, culled all their sweetness in wines,
And lay their naked rinds in the gold sun to dry;
Then some of them, mining out silver, ignored me in chalices
Of intricate work: here was Dionysus on the ridge, chaised
Acanthus running round the pillared bust, and fields of gleaming grass
That shivered in the cooling winds when freshly dark
Black ooze came down the cups. And others came to banquets,
And many came on maidens -- their honey skin was spoiled
By the thickly milk:

Here, Israel, is my providence! Here are your provinces of milk
And honey: a festival of hedonistic pleasures, carnivals of sin; and yet have there been
Always the sages who knew me, always long into the burning night,
The dripping of wax, the turning of parchments in stacks by the black
Of their white, ink-stained beards; some, muttering into cornered retreats,
Would raise their hollowed eyes to the moon, and with their infernal cries
Of antique wisdom and effectual lore would score
The plates of youth clean dry, curdle and mold
Until they were old, and then lying pious,
Flesh burdened with wrinkles
As much of the pumiced page as of age,
Mournfully, they would die.

No, Israel:
The world is filled with pedants and beggars and whores, bores each after each
Their particular monstrance, and a great remonstrance is in store
When the flesh becomes spirit again, when the meat becomes bread,
And my breath moves from general beings
To the mountains and streams that have moved them,
Each to their ends.

"Me iamque iam haec tempora fecit."

Sublimated in the rich metal of his desires
Like crystal, caked like the salt
Round the urinal stalls, and bathing in streams
Of the all pure elixir,
He rose to the voice of the living God.

His spirit ascended, the angels attended
Cool clouds in the breadth of the steaming dawn;
The sun blinked his eye and kernelled and cried
The diaphanous mist, and the gleaming was dun.

All hail to the fair sea, the tablets, the dragon,
Hail all that you pass in the meadows of midnight;
Sip darkness and bird-lime from cisterns and flagons:
The glutinous honey of raptured delights

Where the moon glows in the fragments of sunsets
And time, like chipping glass, stains the winds'
Far breath to the north while the cool south will let
The turbid pools of the stars touch the morn.

Very Like a Question Mark

It could never be the same, after
The sparrow ran into the clear glass
Pane -- it was then that the wooden frame
Bent, then that the window
Cracked, and he looked into the fragments
Of a world below gone black;

Sands melting into glass grind back to sands
And rinds, the chime of the breaking
Limes across the dawn, the setting sky,
While the little bird finds her apotheosis
High in the grubs and dirt; a sprig of grass
Has munched voracious on her hips, a mushroom
Pops between her nose, and all the world waits
For the gossamer fate of her toes: back in his mind

A hundred birds are falling like a thousand portals of glossy space
Are shutting, and the doors loom larger and larger, and the free of flight
Eludes captivity in air, and all songs sing
In shattered silence.

How singular the little creeping of light comes through the pane,
The vacuum sounds of traffic moving back and forth
-- And the long-green carpet of the earth
Is limned about with birds' feet poking out
Like little bits of linoleum.

A Scientific Poem

Masses of flesh creeping on wobbly bones
Across the dirt, colliding and consuming
And returning to the earth. When it bleeds
A red stain taints the ferric ground, and seeds
Of dissension among mattered aspects sing, but somewhere deep
Under the ripple of water and the broad caves, feet
Of cisterns and the distant calling waves, rivers
Striking together like the hum of parallel keys
On a piano, drenched with rain and windblown leaves,

Creeping from the cities' seaves. Black
Darkness of clouds and the thundering storm, a forlorn
Vision of the falling axe, the hammer on the ruddy
Backs of metal planes -- and the sickles taking grain:

And if I'd known these things were a threat to me
The waves would have clamoured and joined in pain
In revolt from the mountains like the distant strain
Of a rising trumpet, the hurricane blast
Of the titans' horn, and the breath,
My last.

The Death of the Author

"By the gods who dwell above, high o'er the plains of Ida
Riding across the world in their winged chariots, their crystal palaces
Of shining gold like the rose-light of dawn: there's Venus who has mercy,
And Cupid of the admirabile locks, Apollo with his halting bow, and Neptunus
Clementia, great pitier of things. If ever mortals, besieged
By the wailing walls of a great sea, or sundered in
The labyrinth of time have clapped their palms together, not in kind applause,
But out of hope for sympathy, and sent fleet-footed prayers to Zeus above,
And nor did their hopes deceive them -- from Kunthia on the virgin rock,
Ariadne on the dire straits, and passing by the wayward sea
Betied Ulysses in his reverent ecstasy
Of sirens (Muse, inspire me
To higher things!) -- then surely where the gods take pity
There is room for mortal hope, there is room for clemency to spare the proud
And save the meek!" Thus was Turnus' prayer, and just as, four months after May,
Boreas takes summons from the sweet West Wind, and while
Zephyrus reclines to the banquet, pageantry of rest, and sips the sweet nectar
The nymphs procure when, wrapping garlands round their holms, they tap
The inner spirit of the trunk, and gather in the bark sweet drops of breath,
Aquillo still takes up his glacial sword, and iced eclairs
Of thunder, girds the shoes that beat across the chasms and the cloak of snow
That fills them in, and decorates his brow not with the laurel of Phoebus Apollo,
But with the croceus-born mistletoe to hang in rich-hued red above his grinning scowl
(the kind you see often on angry skulls, long-dead, rotting
Somewhere far in the desert winds) then jumps on the world, seizes the globe
Like the head of a victim, pulls the bull by her white-haired scalp, and slits
The ruddy blood from the just now brown-stained throat, so anger --
Menin! Rage! -- consumes Aeneas like the brazen branches of a fire
Make the red and silver leaves wither into wrinkled crisps of blackened ash
When druids dance 'mong the elms on autumn's solstice day, brandishing
The ripped, torn limbs of the forest, flashing with fire and globules of flame
Spitting into the spinning air. His fingers wrinkle, tighten round his hilt,
He sees the prostrate belt, and his brows furrow like fields, his face
Tightens up like a dried plum, old orange, franged fruit, and the elixir
Of madness and wine imbibes his veins, breaks through to the meters of conscience:
Now all drunk with anger, now all iron and ashes of conquest --
And nor did the prayer go unheard:
"The time for prayers is past, passed like the sparrow
Passes the holm, where the ring-doves take their nests, before the fallow fields of fall
And the hungry hawk, when still all are marigolds blooming, and the lilies dip, aloft,
Their cisterns of beauty, and the sun shines clear on the golden earth. Then cities
Long at war might rest, their leaders' faces lose their studied
Gloom and a smile might break like a rainbow on lips that advancing armies
Clash with joy, while they hug like brothers who lay down their arms --
The farmers beat swords into plough-shares then, and the wolf hangs his head for the lamb
And lions benev'lent for mice, like some great creature that would take in his claws
All the little, lost things of this world, and whisper like breeze from the storm,
'There you are; you're okay: for you too are beloved...' Oh but I mourn
For faces pallid and lost, thousands of sinking faces, masked in the hollows
Of hell where the air is cool, where deep whispers echo, wail from the rocks,
Downcast like the mast of the sunken that pokes above the depths, while a ripped flag,
Black, Waves like the flicker of hope in their eyes. No, the time for May
And the fragile flowers of beauty is past; you killed Pallas, my beloved, my last
Kindness in a ruined world. Now that belt clings richly to your shoulder, Turnus,
And I see the gems you must have admired, crying each for the rubies of slain,
The sapphires like his eyes, and the marbled medallion a fragment of face:
No! You cavorted! No! You wrung it round with a pretty one, showed it to Juturna
And bathed in her pleasure, feeling cool the waters flowing around you, cleansing your hands,
Setting the record of deeds in the straits, and flowing out to the vast ocean where the waves
Wrap round the shore, rap the shore, tap the carving shore, like a hammer,
Into the inevitable and invisible countenance of my revenge. Blood flows back, Turnus,
Back into the rivers, back upwards of falls, and the whole world wrinkles into itself
Like a burning rose. There is no forgiveness for triumph, and there is no sorrow
For truth." And with that Aeneas grasps his sword, his long blade, silver to the sharpened tip,
And with a trembling hand like the tremors of earth his quaking arm
Raises it into the air, and plunges it down the way a man looking over a pit
Throws a rock, and waits, in celerity of being, for the flint-strike to fall.

Then the vengeful blade found the fountain of breath, plunging into his central, his heart,
The way when a poem is read, and the author speaks to the very seams
Of the reader's garments (new and green
Seem the washing and clashing of time).
So the sword stopped in its frame, to the hilt, connected with lame and perspiring Turnus, expiring,
The way a sharp lash binds together all flesh, digging deep captive arms to the bone,
Pushing down to the very marrow, the core, and then biting firm
Like a dog that drags a dead deer, and tastes the running blood. Then Turnus' soul gasped out
With Aeneas' trembling breath, and both fled to the shadows below.

Chairondas traveled to Opium, to the place of Cincinattus, scholar and sage of some renown, his house

In the tips of the peaks, on Opium's mountain, where the clouds

swirl by like skims of cream, and the skin of the sky

Is solid and different. The lights shift in the upper air, and the sun frowns in multicolored radiance of being. There

The swift chariot of Phoebus makes its rounds in gold-broad brilliance, there

The moon proceeds through the court of her stately grace like a nacreous pearl; while she watches

The fires of the Achaeans are all glittering below, hundreds of fires, thousands of fires, winking and twinkling like a piece of the milky way cut up with a scissors and sprinkled, sprinkled liberally on the outstretched darkling earth, looking up at their mother.

Oh how the nacreous mother mourns when the camps wink out! Mourns with the coming of dawn, to see her children flee by the bridle of swift Aurora -- with the flaming eyes! -- the steed snorts impatiently, paws the ground, gallops off and the charyots are rising, clamps like the clatter of swords and the shouts, death screams and triumphs, and brown soaked with blood! Mourn or rage triumphant, and all of this

None of the wise Cincinattus' concern. He belabors his days perusing

The histories of Persia, of the Orient, of the East. Paging through many a crumbling page

His fingers perch on the word, he opens another book and examines the word, he forms in his mind the image of the word like the slice of a peach floating in the soft and subtle cream, like the slice of dawn through the crack in his window and the steaming, burnt-out candle's ashen

Edge in the pearly sky (gone the nacreous moon) and his mind

Is like butter and not lacking fatigue.

So he dreams of peaches and orchards, and the white grapes he used to pick from his mother's
Garden, like pearls, like little gems of emerald and sapphire in his stretching hands the plums and the olives would fall.

Oh the glorious of globe: he awakes with a start; a knock on the door.

"I am in love with a woman of hair like the silver chaplet of a marbled angel, and I've chaised her in Europe and Asia, the East and the West, but she smiles with teeth like pearls, a rosy white by the sheen of her skin, and she does not care with her copper brows."

"Youth comes to love with age; let the simmer in your heart fire, let it flame, let it burn down forests and whole icy lands where the crystal palaces perch unevenly in the first dropping of snow, the first falling of wintery freezes, only to be shattered by the light of an august sun."

"The snows won't fall in August but the winds blow cold in autumn and I shiver for the chill. Throw another log on the fire."

He cuts a thick leg from the chair and the little corners of flame sizzle about it, the curls of smoke claw round the nails, the pegs (for from oak, for from knotted, proud-strong limbs of iron
Oak) are last to catch, and crackle with resentful steam. Cincinattus strokes his long beard, fine like a sheep's fur, and purses flaking lips, and gnarls a gnarled, oak-like face.

"What is the cure for love, Chairondas? There was a medicine in Asia, in the east. The sages," he flips Confucist lore, bound in leather and brass, "Say the trick was to burn together

A mixture of tea-leaves, powdered flint; the combustion

Explodes and the thick scent

Rises to the nostrils, impels it through the seeping brain. But not just any tea; the leaves
Gathered from orange trees at the end of the world, for there too the thirsty orange hungers their roots

To the depths of the earth; lyre strings mixed in liberally, of course, that goes without saying,
And a bit of powdered fluff from the first spring hare: that makes good tea."

"Sicilius," (for that his other name)

"I respect your ancient lore and books, but I think the words have been

Misprinted and some drama mixed in with the rest.

I read of a golden cup off the other side of Attica wherein was kept

(and here he draws a breath)

The elixir of Plato's philosophy, whose theft

Was sacred by the fingered rivers of Oenoe;

The Hero came long ago, and threw it into the stream, and whoever drinks deep of that

Drinks deep of love."

Now the old man, Silenus, confounded by the change, let the milk of the fading day

Pore over his brows and spill down his chin, and watched for the growing flames and the oyst-made
Sky, and took to uttering one of his prophetic

Cuts of wisdom, which he made like the greased hands of peasants

Potatos and stews for the slaves:

"Sweet in the first morning, and last with the dew
Lasting into the rivers of honey, the milk-dripping
argo of argus-eyed buds. Come in the flower,
When the long corollas hang
Down their sipping pendants of life."

Sing the pride of Kroisos, Muse, Son of Alyattes,
Vainglorious, which put upon him many pains
And destroyed a mighty kingdom, once greatly strong
In wealth, while it placed him on the pyre
For all great flames and licking bolts,
So that the gods' will was accomplished,
When they first came together in counsel:
Kroisos, king of men, and that sage of Execistos.

The Star

I wish I were at the crests of waves,
Looking out over the lapidary waters
Lapping, all facets of burnt ruby brilliance,
While the sun touches the western edge of the distant shore
And the gulls fly low, skimming the water for food.
I would hold myself against the tight winds, the slashing winds,
The winds that sear my shivering arms even as the golden sun
Can crisp the burning waters' edge; the furrowed sands
Would scatter at their might beneath my wrinkled toes
And my shadow project like a monolith, unwavering,
Longer with the falling sun and shorter, then diminishing, as cool night sets
Along the starry blight of timeless sky, eternal
In her distance, a cloak as soft
As all the bars of a prison wall. Is there no star out there,
In tutelary grace, who watches the ever revolving, ingrown fields of space
Alone, utterly alone, but casting a motionless, reluctant gaze
Unknowing and unknown on all the hidden parks?

Nebilungs

Murdered, falling down into the brown earth, whimpering
And dead; mothered in the cruel winds of October
When the pale leaves cristled hard as ice and white
As snow fall above her ruby lids, her still-glowing
Embers of skin, still-beating heart. Dead:
Weep, meadows, you willows bend your leaves, strain
Until your roots crack from the earth, until you tilt
And fall. Fall! Autumn everywhere! : You've murdered
The beautiful summer, you've murdered the still-flying wings
Of the spring, you've pierced the corolla of a perfect blue flower
And stabbed it 'til the sapping veins could purple-nectar flow.
Oh for the beas now, the yellow ones on golden days
Springing resiliently from green stems of eternity, and the
Ever stretching sky. Oh for the little wandering
Creatures, the ants in the basins and courts of the earth!
Oh for the houses and the grass cracking sidewalks,
The scuff-kneed blacklings and resplendified beggars
Holding their dirt-bent, corroding cardboard signs and cups: my reveries!

Teachers of poetry, that is, sophists
Have dried them all up, stuck
A Straw into my skin, into bones, and suck
The red marrow, the blood-flowing marrow, and gnaw
On my good tasting bones. The strains of violins seeping
A little from ochred wood won't drown them out, and my breath
Is so exhausted and puckered my lips that I can't blow a horn,
A gigantic brass horn to draw out my cry so the wind
Could gather up the stirring ruby leaves and stir the embers
Into a consuming, turbulent flame, into a holocaust, and the world
Would be purified in the ringing breeze.

Metamorphosis

Night of the mind after a metaphor, in the darkness
Of words seeking after their
Flesh, of the body as real as embraceable
Forms I sing. But oh this change! How many times
Were the words you read rewritten, how many times was it necessary
To raze my thoughts and then re-raise them, lazar-like,
From the sluggish dead? How many fields
Stitched together by broken limbs and quivering fingers
Must I have crossed in the moonlight, aloft
And lonely from the city's neon edge?
Before I can find my beginning (I left
When I began to climb to attain my second self --
I found him fleeing after a shadow like the shadows
All the while tumbling from the precipice of twilight
Into the depths of the night) I mourn for the loss of myself,
The revision of time, the recreation in my recreation:
How long will the low lying cliffs hold my path through the stumbling fields
Before the whole face of the mountains is changed?

My Generation

One by one I watched them jump
Off the edges of cliffs
With zeal at the going
And never return.

And oh! how these dressed up!
-- It was quite an event. The youths were there
Screaming there drowning voices
Like the gurgle of a whirlpool; the old men
Got pushed to the back, stamped into the dirt, but didn't care:
There time was come. In the crowd
A short weasel of a man, wearing an iron crown
Through his temples and thorns in his eyes
Sold voluminous bottles of liquer. It's best, he said,
If you drink up immediately before rising
Into the engulfing void. The liquor
Slides down your tongue, making it writhe
Like a burning snake, then your eyes cloud, your throat
Waters and sees
New things in your heart: precipitating down your throat
(Again, no need for muscles, the slow moving jaunt
Of the body escalator) and escalating, it hits your stomach, where
It diffuses from the core of your body to all of your heart, your lungs,
Your brain, broad back, down to your buttocks, your feet, your fingers,
Hair, toenails, nose, and eyes, until
Poised again on the tip of your tongue, through veins and arteries
Silently flowing, the whole of your being will scream
And you jump. Jump! Hurl yourself into the abyss, and do it loudly, with a screech,
A cry of wild volupty!

So I see the abyss was yawning. So I see
The wild clouds were riding the straits of the sky like the cliff
Was perched on the darkened gulf, a broad pillar
Of sucking madness. The greedy monster like a god
Engulfed them all, like a wink, like the blink
Of their own eyes, the fantastic vision
Of their mouth, and the empty screams echoing from below like the brink
Of their voice.

Antiquity

A cleaven pot, brown, rising
In purple fragments from the earth
(Grey gristled, where the patterns
Swirl and dog in argus eyes) inside
A few shattered fragments of papyri,
Translated from the Greek, thus:

Lover, the swift borne of your hair
As the rising wind...pluck[ing] a harp
[...] and all the gods, Venus, Apollo:
Round folds of silk and the voluptuous
Texture of skies, he coiled, desiring.

When the lightning cleaves the pot into fragments,
And the nuanced mirage of the clouds wraps around
The ancient temples, twin pillars of Herakles,
The silvered marble of another time...these pots
Speak destinies, I find them each
In fragments, little cutting pieces of agate and jade
In consistence and cost, sharp enough to pluck blood
From the thirsty wound and drive deep
Into the pale skin of a shallow maiden. Parthenos, Athena
I was hunting you, your great pleated folds
Of blond hair falling like the dawn, ripping the sky
To pieces, little pieces swirling with the ravaging passage
Of time and the thunder-bolt lightning,
And the moss and the streams and the rocks.
I was singing eternal
After your shadow.

Do you hear the wind these days? All of them
Are greedy for difference and gain, and no one
Leaves touched in the gentle light of an adoring cove
In the overgrown gardens of time
That unsearchable, quaesiting marble, bending in towards herself
In voluptuous folds, all the scarlet of form and the gold
Of her hair:
Athena I could kiss your lips, your unworshipped lips
While the storm and the ravage of time is consuming the world,
Sweeping the continents into the seas.

Shades

Human beauty was entrusted into my care
He said yes I wrapped myself around him
Like ivy sucking the first sweet sap from trees
I plucked myself into conflagrations of berries but
A sad wind. The sky falls in small drops, very small
When you're lonely and the air is whirling inferno around you,
Very small when the earth turns slowly into shadows
And whirling darkness: if you clasp a shadow
It flees, like the efforts of an adamantine pincer
On the thin and steel-clacked air. Suddenly he was a shadow
Falling across my arms and dampening my dreams like an arid torrent,
A volcanic eruption of water from deep springs above (and
The little vines running into ravines, thick moss-gatherers,
Vines sucking teats of the mountain, juicing
Hard rock). Hello my voice
Quivered in the shadows, patiently, delicately exploring
The far reaches and the arid domains, all the way
To the valleys of hills and the hesitant sunset. Darkness.

(Flash) Photography

So really the rosy forests, really
The standing blue and a picture of
You on the rocks, you by the resinous
Outcropping, cut-picked, piquing
Photographed rocks, weaving together
A dreamland veracity, the blowing
Wind and the lithe photography, ripped
On the white-scored edges, lipped
Grey, faded with dots of withering
Black (oh I could come to you
In the night, in your arms I would take
A million pictures, a million
More, and then a thousand, a hundred
Thousand still-shot pictures of your face):

The golden hues, fading in the so-dark
Edges, and then a dazzling array of
Shadows, gliding, dwelling under by the crannies, nooks,
Brooks of bristling like the shady leaves, even
Singing where the blurs, a kind of exalted
Singing glowing, and the microscopic
Burrs and crops: and where I stop, I lop
A clear-cut stream of dulcimer to the dulcet dark.

Elegy for a Love Toy

I saw you with the beautiful brown hair, russet streaked a scarlet dawn
Of faded gold, unsure and unaware, the rolling folds
Of your fading jeans were dragging on a walk: how
I longed to talk, to spew in bold strokes those words like an autumn twilight: "I love you"
Would we have whispered on casual Venised streets, while a tower
Pokes in the distance through the twin framing hills of below, wrapped
In round stone and the distant rap
Of the beating drums (some errant bum)? Even birds would hum in our sunset quiet
And the air would smell of buttered cakes and the old men taste their kegs
Of cafe'd ale (he's watching the legs of beautiful Meg, the American
Girl in the streets with the dazzling ring, wrung round the next of her pinky,
Gleaming a delicate flash while her bust
Excites another gleam, a heated flush of desire
In an otherwise cracked, worn and wearing marbled...) but we'd taste lips:
Yours soft, round, pale but browned
With a sip of cocoa, merging with your browning, day-drenched skin, my hand
Harvesting tips of golden grain through your darkening hair, other
One wrapped round ecstasy of chiseled space, and in the darkness moonlight streams
Like only cream that skims the void of a remembered face.