Snake wrapped round my spine
Started crawling since I was nine
Guess I should have minded the gaps
Was too busy in the overlap
Inching its way to my brain
But its nestled by my heart
Still it skipped the first refrain
The other two it forgot
Now I’m walking crooked straight
For all the world I’m the bait
Deluded into thinking that
This is normal I’ll be fine
Guess in the grey meantime
I’ll discover roses blue
Everything else is red
Even colors are abused

When I first sold myself there were
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
All the marks of war
All that searing heat
With all that pretty malice
Spilling Paris in the street
‘Twenty marks’ I called
‘Twenty marks’
That was 1943
And Piaf was doing well

Nurse, do you know what it is like:
To have a man inside of you
that you could never love?

There was, once upon a time, a pretty little ****
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
Lying on my floor
And Maman was starving, and my sister, too
Dignity wasn’t half the tax it seemed before
He gave me a baby, and a disease,
That was 1944:
Piaf was quite successful, then

Doctor, can you fathom:
Having sores all over you?
Yes, down there, and
all up and down your thighs, your body burns.
Can you feel that?

Then, the Germans left, and the Allies came, all
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
All of that decor
Fleeing, running out
On the French horizon
Retreat
The Allies were the same
‘Three dollars’ I called
‘Three dollars’
That was 1945:
Piaf was languishing
Paris had died

Jacques, my dear:
Those were our times
smoky cabarets, sculptured croons, fine wines
your rifle on your back could wind my morning with worry
and with my scourges, you took me all the same
but what I remember is:
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
then:

nothing

“Monsieur Boursin - she has passed.”

He sobs,
it sounds like
war.

I can only stand poets
and artists
and those who choose to be my muse
I only like punk band musicians
angry feminists
and men with great hair, to use

I admire, only, those who speak in metaphors
who journal and protest and listen to the doors

I don't give a **** about models
or actors or politicians,
weeds lining their inner cheek
dandelions spat, everytime they speak

but most of all
I can't stand your mother
the way she holds me captive in her box
"sit still porcelain doll"
she says as she smothers
as I try to become the fir, the froth, the rocks

spelling backwards through time,
      stroke by blurry stroke
      a maiden's coal-black hair regales
      the flattery from her lips...  and so the doom
-- and boon of a crimson warrior's arm --
      was drawn from speech a flame,
      and kindled mind to burn away for lust,
one speaker fed and doubly fraught
by goddess's
      invention brought
to give away his name and trust,
for doppelgangers' games
                                 and beauty
                                         to consent~

that trollish abysm our aching selfhood
deems unworthy, war can celebrate:
iconic genius symbol may encourage,
it may remembrance windows of our history~
      but only breath, and inner sight so keen
      on solid strength of living fact
      can triumph in the plain!
some semblance of an older wisdom
strains to orate still, and lust itself afar,
      but brawn and tested fibrous body build
      must turn the page of time;
and this, to know the truth withstood
that vision
        of a perfect youth
                            forever,
one start and line without an end,
      a floating dance of pulling under waves
      that never waves as being surely does
like no ancient-honest country-prophet ever saw--
thus, remnants of the wisdom from a fallen mind;
and so he fell to her and had not her for long...
she had a wider window, immortal panes,
this temptress
       suppleness of limb to shock
and shake the bones of foolish learning,
that thinks itself imbued with everlasting fame.

it was a mossy light
                         of eyelash shine
                                           and sheen
                                                   to woo
                                                        the wisdom out,
electric sense to lure the hapless sap
into a brutish trap: to learn alone the
atheletes pathos, relearn the heart-race
from a chest of seemless vigour,
from lungs of endless winds
and legs of trunkish growth the
channels and the prism of an empty skull
instead of learned ships and foolish mimes of finer times--
                   he does the bidding of her will.











.

An arms length from the abyss,
Lean forward, and I cease to exist.
I look down below and see the river Styx,
Fed by the blood of a billion slit wrists.
I reach down, and undo my zip.
This is as good a spot as any to take a ****.

The Devil's been ******* on me my whole life, it's time he got his.

HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
Hysterica passio of its own emptiness?

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul.  Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself:  I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, "My child, my
child! '

Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.

She begged him not to do it
as he walked toward the pen
where they held a bull so evil
it had killed a dozen men

But he just smiled and kissed her
and climbed up the wooden gate
then he saddled up the daemon
that had killed twelve men to date

She screamed its unlucky
you're the thirteenth man all said
to try and tame this here creature
that so far left twelve men dead

He tried to calm her fear
with a smile and with a look
as the gate was thrown wide open
and the ground beneath him shook

He failed to grip the reigns
as his hands were dripping wet
and the bull became a whirlwind
angered by the scent of sweat

The ground rushed to meet him
but the bulls horns caught him clean
and the hooves kicked down upon him
as twelve men became thirteen

She wept as they gave her
his old cowboy hat of black
and then she walked away in anger
with the promise she'd be back