Cheerily inquiring, I came to Heaven’s gate open to a simple throne,
the sky perforated with stars
and Jupiter’s two-faced moon trailing its orbit
‘Teach my walking soul’

A power station’s lights and racetrack’s beams
pompom the hill and flick along venetians like notes on a stave
Rain pills the screens and art’s gaudy stanzas
as I read, the introvert’s cable, or Arno, takes me

Shirker of my class, gratuities slither off
like a magisterial chain,
blotting the ink on ‘An Urchin’s Guide to Domesticity’
but rue besieged me

They come to hear him talk of art
and flock to the Sadness Panel alleviated and wronged,
a maimed tent fits the news, plumed mountebanks
spruiked from a cypress

Nothing superfluous. We decked our clothes in sack,
speckled books and garbed painting,
fervent Weepers admonishing a rose
while a crane’s brand-name tiaras night

Three mount a cross, but first they hanged my friends
air scooped out from under, the placard square
I follow where I preached
hanged then burned over my ‘privileges’

wanting to dis-embroider all their ilk and paste
crocheting dinner, flirting on a tithe.
and drop.
The Pope commissions a new architect.

CONTENTS: DECEMBER 2011–JANUARY 2012