When's it my turn? I have asked for the umpteenth time! In my bonnet I've asked, in my cotton drawers I've asked, in the rain, in the mud, in the sun, in the wind, I've asked and I've begged! So when's it my turn? Wouldn't I love to enjoy the bright spotlight at the top? But am I doomed, or am I chained, down here under the sand? Where forgotten kings and queens quietly reign; St Pol Roux, a king of my heart. To rest with you, for eternity, only to be discovered after the oceans dry up and our decaying words are still spewing protons and neutrons. Maybe that would be the ideal manner for our poems to go, for our prose to decompose — together in the cloudy oceans we swam in, in the cloudy pool of the pleroma that we bathed in —amniotic fluid, pleromatic love.

I said, no I wish to be made into a purple and orange butterfly. He coughed down his throat rubbed his hind legs together and said, go and sit down ‘neath yonder mushroom or whatever it is; then with a kick, a hop and a jump he caught a pretty particle floating high in the air and came down and rubbed it in his hands and murmured over it walla walla and with a quick lunge threw it at me. I darted away and when I got into the air I was much surprised to find that I couldn’t fly straight. I stopped and looked at myself and behold I was a brand new purple and orange butterfly with two tails where only one had been and I noticed that my entrails were going tick-tock instead of zip-zop. I called down, thanks mister I’ll do it as good for you some day, and away I flowed back to the land of milk and honey where I knew you’d be gracefully lingering on various boughs and there I found you and you gave me one long penetrating glance and said, somehow you seem different.

Filling her compact and delicious body with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice. Fainting with interest, I hungered back and only the fact of her husband and four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying, ‘You are the hottest one for years of nights Henry’s dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ [...] Black hair, complexion African, jewelled eyes downcast... the slob besides her feasts... what wonders is she sitting on, over there? The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. Where did it all go wrong?

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, it is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, and I let down the crystal curtain and watch the moon through the clear autumn.

How far, how far, a kiss may bear us like a traveling ship; I slip out of the borderland of consciousness, kiss me again, again.

… you look like shimmers in the sea.