Initiations

ICEE

2003

When I was 13 we
lived at the far end
of a new subdivision,
the woods beyond
our fence the worst
wild. Back then I
walked the furthest
for an Icee, yet it
was a routine I loved
that first summer in
Florida. It got me
out of the house,
that sorry ward of
family wounds, my
mother upstairs in bed
and three siblings
warring not so openly
any more, careful not
to rip the sutures
which so rudely
bound us together.
My errand aimed
me away from all
that in a dutiful,
excusable way, what
with that imperial
season dazing us all
in a rising soar of sun
and crickets. It was
both merry and
malevolent, like the
shards of light on
our swimming pool
which seemed to laugh
and burn along the
same lucid skin.
Yes, an Icee was just what
a boy desired in
that pith of suburban
summer, its oblations
as pure as fresh-squeezed
juice. And so I left each
day around 4 p.m. after
the scheduled round of
storms had passed, the
sky by then a stole of
aftermath--steaming
pavement and heat
lightning. I walked
those two dozen blocks
from home with my
t-shirt slung over my
shoulder (necessary
at either end of
the mission). A few
kids rolled by on
Hot Wheels or knocked
clackers on house
porches, but for
the most part I was
always alone. At the
7-11 it was always so
terribly cold, like a
bad brother to the day.
The Icee machine
had two flavors - Coke
and Cherry -- and a
combination of the two.
I poured out the flavored
slush of ice each way,
on different days, believing
each carried a certain joss
to me, that on the right
day, with the right pour
cooling in my hands, those
skies would deliver
love my way. That was all
I cared for then -- not sports,
nor cars nor grades --
just that gift of cool
which would lend my steps
a Bond-like sway and
turn the eyes of pretty
girls my way. — That was
my only thought as I
idled home, Icee in hand,
back to family routines of
chores and dinner which
waited for me unsheathed
and sharp. Just one kiss,
I’d pray up toward summer’s
twilight, seeing no other
way out. And then I’d
sip my Icee, its slush
so sweet and cold that
too-eager draws would
rush a headache my brow.
In a few months I’d learn
to obtain other wares
from that store -- Swisher
Sweet cigars (they wouldn’t
sell me Kools) and
magazines laded with
hussies in red drawers
Soon I would learn darker
reasons to egress from
my home, searching for
cool and cooler comforts
in Florida’s vast suburb,
each house a plot of
paradise, half-acre jots
of personal desire summed
into a bland, common hell
-- But in that raw hot first
season, there was only the
Icee and its way in summer,
deep and sweet and cold
where nothing else held.
My wife and I drove
through that subdivision
a few years back, out on
a long day trip from home.
I hardly recognized
the approach -- so
many miles more
developments and strip
malls: my earlier years
all paved over. My own
old digs seemed cramped,
small and old, the houses
all in that sort of ruin which
Florida ages so fast, once
the first blush has bleached
in the sun. The orange
trees in every yard were
like old olives, bend and
scrabbly, their fruit like a
spent woman’s womb. Our
house was hardly what I
remembered -- new color,
a wing added on, a fence
knocked out to give more
driveway, in which a green
dune buggy sat on blocks.
Whatever we were back
then had fully drained
away, and all that changed
now looked tired. The
store had been boarded up
long ago, it seemed, abandoned
as places go in Florida,
too expensive to raze,
busier corners on which to
build better stores filled
with all the goods. Well,
my thirst grew up too.
In later years I drank iced
vodka, revenantly wired to
its cold blue fang. Doors
opened when I drank it,
rooms revealed, desire’s
zenith spiked by the
lowest means, pitching
the sun into the
Gulf like a speared olive.
Back then each house
I walked past burned with
the purest booze of
possibilities, each
who could very well let me in,
sigh my name, unclasp
the hooks that brassiered
such swollen nipples.
Those twilight walks were
each a voyage down and
out a well of history,
possibility and lust,
burning for a beloved who
hadn’t yet a face.
That was 30 years
ago. Only here do those
summer fades remain,
in some region within,
the storms receding
into that darker interior,
flashing high in their swart
bellies, bathing all in
that last of light, both pink
and sere, the pavement
steaming, a smell of rain
and rotting oranges in the air,
like a funk rising from
mysterious mere, like
the sweat of my own body
in this early, dank day,
where those daily transits
remain in still torrid
corners of this ripening brain.



From Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology:

“The transformation of the child into the adult, which is achieved in higher societies through years of education, is accomplished on the primitive level more briefly and abruptly by means of the puberty rites that for many tribes are the most important ceremonials of their religious calendar.

“When a Central Australian Aranda youngster is between ten and twelve years old, for example, he and other members of his age group are taken by the men of the village and tossed several times into the air, while the women, dancing around the company, wave their arms and shout. Each boy is then painted on his chest and back with simple designs by a man related to the social group from which his wife must come, and as they paint the patterns the men sing: ‘May he reach to the stomach of the sky, may he group up to the stomach of the sky, may he go right into the stomach of the sky.’ The boy is told that he now has upon him the mark of the particular mythological ancestor of whom he is the living counterpart; for it is thought that the children born to women are the reappearances of beings who lived in the mythological age, in the so-called ‘dream time,’ or altjeringa. The boys are told that from now on they will not play or camp with the women and girls, but with the men; they will not go with the women to grub for roots and hunt such small game as rats and lizards, but will join the men and hunt the kangaroo.

“In this simple rite it is apparent that the image of birth has been transferred from the mother to the sky and that the concept of the ego has been expanded, simultaneously, beyond the biography of the physical individual. A woman gave birth to the boy’s temporal body, but the men will now bring him to spiritual birth. They will continue and consummate his post-uterine gestation, the long process of his growth to a fully human maturity, refashioning his body, his mind as well, joining him to his eternal portion, beyond time. Furthermore, in the ceremonials that he will presently observe the tasks proper to his manhood will in every detail be linked to mythological fantasies of a time-transcending order, so that no only himself but his whole world and his whole way of life within it will be joined inseparably, through myths and rites, to the field of the spirit.

***

SAVED

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000


summer 1971:
I was poised to
rock the world
like someone who
thought he’d been
forever denied it
fresh from 40
days in the desert
now standing
amazed at
the split melons
and pastries
heaped upon
the table.
My heart
strung to that
Mustang with
razor wire,
indecently
taut and brilliant.
Yet just t
the moment
when I began
slashing that guitar
down through
the frilly billows
of the world
I was told about
the hellfire
such acts
eternally engendered.
A little black
and white Christian
comic book
on sin, where thirst
is the Devil
and to take one
sip is to die hard
and harder and worse.
Fear brought
me to that “rap
group” on Saturday
nights where
I was saved
by Jesus from
the gleaming
tooth of that guitar.
My brother and
I rounded the
town’s sad preterit
in our family
station wagon and
made our weekly
Saturday night
pilgrimage to
Lakeland
where we read
scripture, prayed,
battled our demonic
glands, cried
with communal
relief, sang
soft songs & hugged.
We were the oafs and
nellies of teenaged
whitetrash exclusion,
gawky and
pimply, horse
mouthed and fat.
Faith’s bullion
of brokenness,
my mother’s
dark hoard.
Christ redeemed
us to insubstantial
fire, our hormones
fed to the flames,
transporting us
to a hysterical
purgatory of
weekly salvation
and exorcism,
all of us rich
in penance for
hungers we could
yet barely name.
I believed to
the extent that
I had known
exclusion and cried
over the world’s
callous mock
of all my imperfections.
Always one
in need of proof,
the miracles
were convincing.
When my father
came down to visit,
I dreamed one
night that my
parents decided
to get back together.
A wind blew through
the living room
picking me up
to the rafters
with pure elation.
The next morning
my parents assembled
us kids to tell
us that God had
healed them
and they would
eventually reunite.
I was baptized in
the Atlantic Ocean
at Melbourne Beach
on a hazy
summer morning
in June. The water
pink-cerulean in
first light and
warm as I was
hauled under
and just then
I felt a wave
pass both over
and through me
emptying me of
all trace of hurt
and rage and
trilling me with
some sense
of boundless depths
inside. A magnificent
sun rose with me
from the water.
We sang Christian
songs holding hands
and crying softly
on the beach.
But soon after
I stepped
on a unmarked spot
where the lifeguards
had buried some
Portuguese
manowars and
the fires leapt
back up into
me, filling me
with the world’s
shrill deadly
delightful pang
from which there
can only be one
response.
Saved from
childhood I
was poised,
Bond-like, to
take the world
back. God saved me.
Then a guitar
saved me from God.
God got me back.
I lost God, got
the guitar back,
then lost the
guitar. Now
I’m slowly
getting lost
in old guitar
music which
may have
been God’s
all along.








GHOST HARPOON

Nov. 3

I hold a finned man’s
wake aboard his old
salt box, deemed
by silted depths akin
enough to this white
writing chair to make
the waters wild and
the riding rough.
Not to revel in first
waking pleasures --
though of course I do,
I must -- but to swivel
my view futher
back and down to
You, grandfather,
the barnacled grail
castle I seek inside
the hope of ever sailing
back to shore.
In the greening of
my loins when I was 14
I became a vicious
creature, selfish and
greedy, pent on the
predations of a pleasure
I refused to only dream.
My blooded hands cried
for real breasts warm
and flapping in them
freed from hung
brassieres, for ever
more embolded forays
through the loosened
folds of desire.
No simple kiss
would do what I by then
could mount; my years
thus grew consumed
with the specifics of the hunt
-- a date, reclining candlelight,
the music on the radio
like rain on the roof as
we talk late and later
toward that stage’s
raw proscenium where
I would go as far as she
would let me just to
slake the boldened spear
You threw through me.
Such conquests
were the metaphor
You used, Grandfather, to
get me on the whale which
plunged far wilder depths
than a young woman’s frail
complicit so-problematic Yes --
meant, as You know, to breed
the intimate enduring hearth
with the profferred charms of sex.
Of that I learned to sing
her way, but this ...
Today I see how all the while
You were clinging to the
undersides of her rapt embrace,
behind her blue erasures,
imprinting my cunt-addled
verbs with a colder copper sort
of salt, for purposes conceived
ten thousand lives ago
on Your dolphin ship
as my tribe scanned brutal
marges for the breech and
spout of food. In the first flush
of my sexual fire I was
hindered by a newly-blooded
faith -- I converted to the
Pentacostal church the
summer I turned 14; just
when everything blossomed
in my body, my soul got
hitched to highminded songs
and brimstone glottals
where salvation was desperate,
a flailing up from the froth
of abysmally sweet depths.
It put the brakes on my
desire: not enough to keep
me from blundering on, but always
freighting the blue ache of need
with a reeky sense of sin,
at once the hunter growling
for his catch while confessing
every barb’s dead-on toss
to the priest in the candled
dark of a harborside cathedral
while sea-gales fucked the steeple.
That was You, salt father, from
both sides of the tale, beseeching
to me in every wave’s sprawl
that showed a tun’s fat flank,
crooning cold gospels in my ear.
Thus I was instructed in
the ways of men sea-thirsty
for the blood and spume of
pussy juice always with
a knocking at the gate
my own, repentant
heart, judging its own
hard thrusts
into every abyss of the sea.
I rounded down
the ire of my loins to here,
down all these years, these
pages, these metaphors
of salt and blue and You.
Am I manned at last
enough to lead my tribe
in hunting ferally & free?
Is that the solus of the
bells which chorus in
the dark offshore, buoyed
in my own singing balls,
a sound whose voice I am?
Then let me be done
with coffin boats and
jump from hearse to fish,
to ride the rest of the blue
tale out in a savage, plunging
swish, the two worlds healed
in one divinely piercing bliss.



Again from Campbell’s Primitive Mythology:

“Although the rites certainly have a psychological function and must be interpreted in terms of the general psychology of the human species, each local system itself has a long history behind it of a particular sort of social experience and cannot be explained in general psychological terms. It has been closely adjusted to specific, geographically determined conditions of existence, and comprehends, furthermore, certain archaic notions of cosmology that have been determined from millenniums of meditation on the recognized natural order of the living world. From culture to culture, the sign symbols presented in the initiation rites vary considerably.

“No functioning mythological system can be explained in terms of the universal images of which it is constituted. These images are developed largely from such infantile imprints as those that we have reviewed and constitute merely the raw material of myth. They carry the energies of the psyche into the mythological context and weld them into the historical task of the society where the symbols function, not in the way of a regressive recall of the spirit to the joys and sorrows, desires and terrors of little Oedipus, or of the earlier bambino, but rather as releasers and directors of the energies into the field of adult experience and performance. Mythology, that is to say, is progressive, not regressive.

21st CENTURY

2001

Every age requires a new confession.

— Emerson

Half of me walking
from a dead century.
Launched in ‘57
with Sputnik on
the crest of the
Baby Boom.
My tit the Sixties,
Watergate my weaning.
I walked off an
ex-Christian geek
who just wanted to
play the solo to
Led Zepplin’s “Since
I Been Lovin’ You.”
Tolkein and Tull
my dormitory spooks
down a far Western night.
Nuclear winter and
Sylvia Plath’s gas oven—
Booze, Brian Eno,
Roethke’s Straw for the Fire
fed to the flames
of one very bad
winter night.
A guitar bridge through
a woman’s white thighs
leading to me southern
beaches, the end of
the cold war and
desconstruction. Sex
signifying nothing in
an endless moonwalk
neon-lit by Mikey Jackson’s
vanishing nose. Corporate
gigantism in a dinky stockroom
as the last band failed
and I sobered up to
be dad student and
intellectual. Recession
and Iraqi taunts
my distaff, dark mentor,
tormented by a bloodless
air war with its flashy
blade and oh so dark shadow.
I divorced to global
capitalism and the Internet,
a madeira darkening the
sea, harrowing, fattening,
going online and virtual.
Teens take up weapons
and spray illiterate brains.
I remarried inside a secret
bottle and sprayed
the cage with tiger’s pheromes.
Didn’t work. Terrorist
bombings ashore and abroad
toll the awful clock,
turning one century’s wild
page to the next. No
bug worth the millenium’s
steel byte. Kept writing
through hell’s circles to
plug the jug again and
jog on. What time is there left
to speak of what follows?
A page, maybe two, sending
off as many boats as I can.
I suckled on war and modernity;
the other half of me now
raises sons and daughters
in a wild fosterage,
weedy in its words
and headed deep for the hot heart.



COLLOQUY
WITH BICKY BOUSE

2004

When I was 14 I’d ride my
Schwinn Stingray out from
our development & down
a long country road to
the next subdivision, this
one even balder than ours
not a single tree about
to shade suburban
lives from the over-brilliant
Florida sun. I’d call on
my friend Becky who
was 17 & in love with
a boy back in Texas
& wise in the ways of
smoking dope and
being in love so much
as to fuck with utmost
zeal -- things I knew
nothing about
but was eager unto
death to learn, as if that
knowledge would at last
molt me from the
badlands of my wormy
insufficient self.
Usually there were
a half-dozen kids getting
high in the living room
during those empty
afternoon hours before
her mother got back
from work. The Moody
Blues or Yes
always seemed to
alternate with Alice
Cooper and Led
Zepplin on the record
player, the A and B
sides of our early
‘70’s counterculture,
a soup of stoner bliss
with more raffish
chunks of meat
thrown in, perplexing the
entire broth. Her
younger brother (a year
older than I) would
be in that circle
of defiant children’s
faces, passing the
next joint & bragging
about how much
pussy he was getting,
fucking his girlfriend
twice a day & even
going to Mazola parties
where a dozen
boys & girls got naked
& sloshed pudendas
in a common ooze.
Even then I knew
it was all talk
but whenever
after school
I’d see his girlfriend
climb behind him
on his motorcycle
in a miniskirt and
combat boots &
spreading for him
from behind, I’d
watch them zoom
off in seething envy
and rage at my lot
of bad luck, strict
faith, and that brilliant
wall of fear that
always stayed my
hand from the zippers
of the neighborhood
girls just when it was
time to furrow on.
How long oh Lord!
I’d pray, teeth bared
at mirror and heaven.
While the party
wallowed deeper
in its daily trough
of high, Becky would
lead me out of the
house and down
to a stream of sorts
out back, a drainage
ditch really, where we’d
sit and laze and
watch the water
tinkle merry in its
foil, the Florida sun
of those spring
afternoons passing
slow and breezy and
fair and bright.
Flooding us (me,
at least) with that
high light that was
its own pure invitation
to a way of love
I could not then quite
fathom, nor ever
since fully name
(though once again,
I try). We’d pass
a roach back and
forth on tweezers,
wheezing full the
last of dope, while
Becky -- blonde,
a faint mottle of
acne redding her
face, with eyes
as blue as that
Florida sky --
instructed me in
all that she
had learned about
getting high and
fucking with a ripened
heart. She’s tell
me that you never
bogart a joint but
share and share
it full until its
fully gone. How
you hold that sweet
leaf’s smoke
in your lungs
as if you were
travelling underwater;
and that the longer
that you held
the smoke the
further you would go.
I did as she
said, lips working
the pulsing roach,
inhaling hard
and long. Dazed,
our senses runneling
out in a dozen wavelike
paths, we’d fantasize
about a Dopers Paradise
on some island
across the sea
you boated to
while smoking joints,
sails filled with
each harsh exhalation.
The island was verdant
with poppies and
peyote, ‘shrooms
and cannabis
plants so high that
you felled them
with an axe and
one plant was sufficient
to stone the tribe
for a year. She told
me about all the
drugs -- dropping
acid (carefully, with
friends), the bitter
taste of mushrooms
& the carnival palette
which followed, the
vroom in hashish
and the harrowing
wildness of PCP --
She’d done ‘em all
and I was greedy
to hear of it all,
virgin as I was to
this doper’s swoony
veld far outside
the rigor of my
days, my God, my
past. I smoked my
first joint with her,
I think -- where and
when, I can’t remember,
nor the conditions
of how we would
ever meet, of such
different ages and
afternoons -- Maybe
she had lingered
to talk when I was
handing out tracts
at school & invited
me to try her
doper’s heaven as
an alternate to
the cold cirrus
of Jesus’ arms.
In that circle I
had too much to
say, but when alone
with Becky I was
all ears, the eagerest
of students.
I was virgin too to
love, and so I
plied her like
a prosecutor to
tell me all she’d
learned. She rambled
on staring at the
water about the
boy she loved back
in Texas, whom she
had to leave when
her mother got
divorced and fled
this way. How she
met him at a kegger
when she was 15
& how he produced
a joint from a shirt
pocket, lighting up
& inviting her to
the welcome
of that cloud -- her
first time getting high.
How it hurt like hell
when he busted her
cherry (those words
are etched deepest
in my memory)
and all the sweetness
that had followed from
that burst fruit, in
all the subsequent
nights of fucking
that had followed,
whenever and wherever
they could, and
however they desired.
How she was saving
her money -- each
visit she’d update
the count -- for
next fall when she
was 18 and fly as
fast as she wished
back to the sweaty
arms of her man.
She’d lapse then
into silence and
we’d watch the water
for a while (or I’d
watch her watching
that glide, savoring
the flow of her eyes
in reverie as much
as she did water).
Those afternoon
stoned reveries
were of things
too far from us
to ever be fully kissed
-- doper isles,
bowers of love. My
love for her was
of that ilk -- all
of it impossible,
just stolen time
& dreams & this
fully ripened woman
exuding love from
every pore, like a
high, full sailing moon,
though that love
was not for me.
Come 5 o’clock
I’d groan and swear
and say I had to
be getting home,
& leave Becky
to her own
nightly cup of ills.
I’d ride my Stingray
home, trolling slow
along that mile-long
lane where cows
beyond barbed fences
swished their taILS
& shat, the afternoon
sloshing dulled bronze
from all its rims.
Home for me was
chores & homework
& mandated Bible
study & prayers
(intercessions on
my behalf for
Becky’s lips & breasts).
My mother in her
black habit of
sadness & the
floors all pins
& needles veined
with furtive,
impossible desires.
In two months
I’d be gone from
all thing Florida,
flown north to
save souls at
my father’s church
in northside
Chicago. Dope
and sex were
both forestalled a
few years more
while I got a better
hand of my miseries
inside the Bible’s
walls. My high
school yearbook
from ‘72 has a
note from Bicky
Bouse (that I guess
her dopester’s handle) --
“If you can’t be good,
be careful! Remember me!”
Not a note inside
that scrawl of the
thrall I felt for her
which has seeped,
like honey or sea-water,
into all these later
words. Oh well.
I never found that
doper’s isle as I
voyaged down my
years -- my booze was
always sighted on
a much saucier,
sleazy shore -- but
of love I think I
got closer to the
place her eyes
saw looking at that
stream. Surely she
instructed and guided
me into all the
boat’s I’ve sunk.
She taught me
to hold onto the
dream until it
nearly bursts the
lungs: & then
let go of it in
one dazed flow
& savor what
dreams mine.
Thanks to Bicky
Bouse I found
a warm spot
out of my
accustomed walls --
not with her drugs
or as her lover
but down that
wilding stream
between her
eyes and voice.
My next muse
and second mother.





THE SOUL FISH

2005

... The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.
-- Jack Gilbert, “A Walk Blossoming”

Wisdom consists in keeping the soul
liquid. There must be the Abyss, Nyx,
and Chaos, out of which all things come,
and they must never be far off. Cut off
the connection between any of your works
and this dread origin, and the work is shallow
and unsatisfying.

— Emerson, 1842 journal

In rural Ireland -- where the men who
remain often fail to marry and then
go mad -- there is a stubborn folk belief
that the soul is a fish located under
the arm. It’s a slippery, untrustworthy
presence, this scaly soul, prone to
errant nonsense, whispering all night
from those men’s ancient pillows
to sell the farm and seeking love
across the banished oceans
of the earth. Pure foolishness, that
a fish would swim that far, just to
expire between some cuspate thighs,
when pints and pipesmoke are
almost enough tamp the grieving down.
Still, there’s something noble to
them about that fish’s travail, so bold
and burning that it knocks down every
church in the parish, leaving turds
in the chalice. Soul begone! is the
prayer for too-clenched teeth -- not the
soul we pray Michael row to heaven
but its fraught freezing sea, all waves and
salt liquor and fluked beasts who
loll and haul the tide like the
fifty cows of Tethys. It is the lurching
part of every desire that must betray
the long-denied bed. No wonder
schizophrenia runs rife in the poor
counties of western Ireland,
too close perhaps to those tall cliffs
of Moher where the distance to the
doomed sea is measured the ache luring
and leaping in the chest, somewhere
beneath the arm that pushes back
with a man’s failing strength. Their
churches too long ago banned that
fish from the liturgy, and now those
churches fade to ruin, ossuaries of
Latin embalmed in a hoarse brogue.
The crash of North Sea surf against
those cliffs will eat the heart of God
away and all the fish will tumble
down at last into the reign of foam
and fire. And then the good aged
crofters of Clare and Kerry will
quit their bruited turf and join
hands out there to dance and
then fan out to fey the bed
of every maid matron and crone,
a school of salmon leaping
from the lakes to barge their
way on home. And all the
gals will sing Amen my man.





CAPE BLUE BALLS

2005

O nymph, loveliest of all the ocean,
though my existence gave you no joy,
what did it cost you to beguile me
with mountain, cloud, dream or void?

-- Adamastor, titan-spirit of the Cape
of Good Hope in Camoes’ The Lusiads


Love drew You here -- OK, desire,
that full ache of wave in gale,
a blueballed bull frenzy which cannot
think of higher things till the lower
ones get done, bull balls to walls
of salty hoochacha, thighs
flung like shores of a roaring
deep-contessa sea. A woman I was
dating tentatively after my first
marriage smiled when I at last
proposed that we make love;
you mean you want to fuck me,
she said with an evilly
complicit sigh, and the whole
space we’d built shifted and
went tumbling down the red maw
of the wave which hurled itself again
and again and again between us
the lovers become the cry of surf
relentless on wild shores. We both
wanted it bad that hot summer
of hurled storms, but what that
was could not be slaked with what
our sexes marshalled to the task
-- cock in cunt, tongue to clit
or slathering sperm foam,
teeth nailing sharp desire
to screamed nipples, balls drumming
on asscheeks, no: None
of those red permutations would
equate, and that was where I
found You, my yowling Cape,
the awe in every awesome clinch
augmenting every futile Yes!
my love and I kept shouting
at each other as we teased the
fragrant sprite from each others’
loins. You never recovered from
the lust which betrayed You
to rock and shore and storms
to nth infernity; here at this
quietest hour, love and age
distill me to I yet war on
with dry eternity, choosing
still to roger on, the old sea-bull
between my knees, his horns
ramming toward the pure
puerile wilderness of swelter,
panties dangling from the lees.
Desire drew You here, but
love if that hard ache is what
is loudest on this page
and is the bawling rage
of every angel jism to
splash the harrows of Your Cape.
Here where nothing ever quite
gets done will nothing else quite do.
Red in royal amplitude
and every a smiling blue.