James Joyce had smelling salts and ***** tins tucked in his Dramamine
and just off the coast of his swarthy daggers, lay all the pirates of bright minds
clumped in a sponge of all the orange that an insipid grin
could forge into a cufflink at today’s prices -
and still bargain.
Frumpy catalogs of myriad departures, woven into leathery air… dark portals and cucumber sandwiches; savoring an afternoon of incomplete theorems
At High Tea, at odds -
with Low Tide…
but consensual by default
Like a lamb in a spider’s web
when all flies are ghosts
of Veal.