The Glumland Gals
for the love of Henry ...
After trawling low-lifescenes, bitterbread thoughts gulp on raw Gin
before the Suckledown on the Glumland Gals,
to dull the aches of another insecure day.
In a different yard, blindfolded extras cut diffidently from the scene
crash through into the local tableaux — to play dead:
A bluff-homily on the impact of ceremony for the Celebrity Deathbed;
royalty all but to termites,
In the sad parade of dying friends.
The fractured lyric pantomime about love and lethal exchanges
stirred, though shaken to the core, styled in Brilliantine-sleek spreads,
Found the recrimination unexpectedly scrawled along breaths, within the marrow snare: Hot curd slicing centrifugal incisions across
their hides
While tree pages summon up their blood reciting the death of Falstaff
“There is some soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distil it out.”
Such reproach reclines in a still pool, running regretful
across an interrogative stare which, in the fading light, weeps
for having to take such leave of absence in the Whitmanesque deaths
of York and Suffolk.
The bloody yawn of war glares like a suspect caught by sleevecuffs
to an unwarranted electric chair, foreign to the purpose
with an uncomfortable fit of Memories
verging on tears of any subtext: Henry V
-“Puttaniere”: Suckling glum gals stitched to life
by patches of verse.
Henry buttoned-up, Never to be Shakespeare’s goodtime boy, drew the expertise of siege: HIV, the tattle replacement guide along the banks
of displacement-behaviour, predicated on a conditional England
always in some reversal of Hope and Fear.
A new reformation sewn in Aids; quilts
autobiographically lifted with the tongue of memorial poignancy;
whetting appetites for the Glumlass lap-dancers
. . . only to offer the sharper interpenetration
of art to the bone: — about the egotism of Affliction,
laying bare such Snares of Relevance: as if
this procession of manly men was not to remind you of something.
Published in CrossingGenres 2017