endlessly on a spindle, exultation's voice
becoming more wan with every pass
under the reading head. Extracting

stricken whisperings from background noise
is an occult pursuit, and frowned upon. Consult
court entrail-sifters for approved prognosis.
 

* * *
 

REFERRING IN SOME WAY to the body -
your body, mine - the field
of reference in no way a meadow

to lie down in, body-
to-body in the light of fresh
discoveries. Your field

is far-afield, neither enfolding
nor overlapping my unkempt corner,
my dream of you for now.
 

* * *
 

DON'T ASK DON'T TELL too coyly
accommodating, if by accommodation you can mean
immurement in a privy. Nobody

expects the inquisition to recant, authority's
self-anointing proxies with their staves
of polished brass. Doxologies

are songs of praise, stirrings of noble
cocks: a violent and loud
ullulation that dismembers sleep.
 

* * *
 

FOR VALIDATION look no further: the words
and tune sub rosa, as ever, as always.
My joys and sorrows bore you

to tears almost. There is a god
of thresholds, and another
of incontinent weeping; their mutual

contempt maintains, by mutual consent,
the order of sublunary affairs
in its disorder.
 

* * *
 

WASH ME THROUGHLY but not roughly;
with gentle cleansing action make me
buff, and fragrant as a calf

is to its mother. Hyssop may
have been marjoram; moderately
neurotoxic, to avoid in pregnancy.

Bruiser, relent: re-knit what you have
fractured, grant what we crave:
deep-down ablution, chthonic irrigation.