Each of us talks as though from the centre of things

As though, in our centres of things, is the place to be,

I know, is the locus falsetto which everyone sings,

How to get through, undo, such a wicked death pledge of a sting!

Mine adores disobedience, it’s luscious, as sweet as is yours,

Thy fandango flirts trimly with grimly inordinate ease

Soft-soaps like to swell, and ingratiate echo a babbling breeze:

The definitive dance is romancer and masquerade

Borne on Putin’s audacious swagger I pace the floors;

A stature overbuilt,

Even alone in a palace I want to fill it out

Nor no room for camp-followers; let them go off, sit and fawn, envy me as they sulk

As one room I grace , then the next; my preposterous brawn!

What comes from my mouth is like yours; a full sonorous breath

Something grandly performed by the puff of my corpulent chest

Tressed in sequins of certainty; even a tie-dyed string vest,

Thereto clothed in unthinking, my figure mistakes notoriety

“Words maketh a man”, stated once a confessional counsellor,

“Speak, let me see thee”; his sentence he tasked a Cassandra

Who croaked one-note sambas so ego-blanched, tinctured accordingly,

Crowed atop of the waste heap his grandeurs had fabricated

Ask you what call, what the rise, what the fall, might here-enter

The lips’ sheer votive ewer of odours

All is stately beseems, fair halloos and esteems, at work on distended demeanours:

Engage, overhaul, call to mind an install; a not-hard-to-compute metanoia.

Letters, like laundry pegged after one’s name, are no tokens;

For sure are the glories of letters the story of weighted stones

In the pocket, at drowning; our free-thinking’s aggregate burdens,

Their runes, only told by the gods of the fold, read the acts of their animadversions,

Yet the single thing needful awaits, like the needle its camel,

And now are we lighted, set down to life’s brightest enamel,

At vocation’s location, precisely inimically enters,

Common Truth’s Central Spring and Great Comforter, Son Providential

Let the good-Lukes among us, together beside The Physician

Apply olden simples and gather up herbs to the case

Here’s that wisdom of folly twice-wise an attribute of God

In the bride-praise of saints; the derision of impudent clods

So affect, break our egos, closed tombs fraught with airs of regard

Stones inflicting the heart as diseases;

Vexatious contusions, imprimaturs not of your stable

Medicine by restorative, administer new-born correctives

Hand them blessedly to us, as certainties hoped-for; oh, do it!

Lord, grant us in this, our amends with your kiss. Amen. Amen.