i
Painted face sits shotgun
on a pennyfarthing chakra
ridden blindfold.

A twist of spine
swings him pendular
every beat, a half-finished bongo trill
nudges black berets askew.
Goatee stubble corrals galloping speech
into enclosures.

Break comma stop.

ii
The chorus,
a fat thousand-eyed mollusk gapes:
he juggles
a bomb
an asp
a knife.

Does he
drop the bomb, ****** the knife,
let the poisonous snake bite?

With child's plainspokenness
we play rock scissors paper
with death’s ivory hands waiting.

Bomb shatters knife
knife slices snake
snake eludes bomb.

The marks whelp their joy
clapping, weeping
with the thousand hands and eyes
of Guishan Guanyin.

Azrael's eyes
drowned in narcotics
***** from the shadows.
Pupils dilate, prolapse
in a unison of aqueous humour.

A blur of dervish
swallows the air
spreads like virus.

iii
Outside the amphitheatre
wings grazing crumbling walls
Azrael peddles dice.

"Worn from the teeth of a dead Logos," his voices sing
his nebulae of tongues clicking against teeth
arrayed like tombstones inside his abysses of mouths
breath smelling of hemlock and grift.
His stock sells out.

After a rainy night of craps
we hissed graft
in the whorl of the priest's ear.
He went home to bed
and dreamt of riches
pouring from the wounds
of sweat-shop children.

iv
In the morning
eight bells peal.
Eyelids hummingbird beneath a black sun
choking the sky over Styx.

Flayed by owls
flendo cinere
we bask in charcoal
and spit obols
into the ferryman's blistered hand.