eyes

Eyes like drenched violets

Highs like trenched violence

thighs like wanton pirates

To rise in flounce euphoric and twirl,

a boyish bounce then a gamine whirl

everything becomes this nighting girl

enrapturing, capturing

the saucy unslaked sad eyes

of benched pilots and celibates

celebrants all, warming their icy hands

on the glow of her scarlet starlight

II

He sighs as honeyed starlets’ pirouettes

wrench worlds away in a mooncalf daydream

What shall we call it ?

A dream in a ruined castle

An old man’s folly

This performative pantomime of lust

Untimely, ungainly, unmanly

Or holy water flung against rust

and fast approaching dust

“a limerence” Old Tweedy pronounces

Huffing stale shag,

Glasses sliding down his long nose

Next door huffs and tuts

In a faded, fated dressing gown

‘plum’ according to the brochure

“Disgusting, that’s what I call it

What’s he thinking, at his age”

For we must and will have a chorus,

Not high kicking, but all low blows and stamped toes

She and her kith guard the gates of propriety

Holding aloft in triumph

flint flakes of insanity

(sparkling struck cock lathered insanitary)

They burn with profound banality,

Flaming with equal delight : Mr Toad

For multiple breaches of the highway code

Gypsy childs hankering for an open road,

A painted peoples’ delight in ink and woad

And the horned hierophants of unfashionable gods

Struggling to absorb the latest restrictions on oysters, blood sacrifice, occasional vice and unrestricted joy

And he, he polices their minds with equal ardour

Using science as a pretext, Using subtext as a scalpel

slicing and dicing, calibrating creation

To divide and fool, each cut creating a new rule

To parse smoke and parcel souls into little pots

Locking in a box the star lit silver fox

To be continued – a work in progress