‘You could never live with God’ she said, puffing a long clay pipe
and blew a bubble that shimmered
with a distorted rainbow window
She drew a sharp pointed hatpin from her skin
and lunged
I saw a thousand soldiers die in the remnant
of that bubble
feeling them fall to earth
lifeless
cracked in a Cubist nightmare
a mirror of pieces of Christmas bauble
chrome peeled off a spotlamp
a silver holly leaf
and a partridge in a pear tree
she leered with her eyes and ate the pear
The partridge scuttled into cover
and I heard it mumbling in the wagon
she was deaf to God, anyhow
when he called, she was out
did I go and see Him sometimes
in His purple robes
in His marble home
in His little warm Ark
‘I always knock, you know . . . . .’
she said, eating the liquorice pipe
‘and I always avoid the Jewish quarter
after, and on, the Sabbath:
in fact, every day’
‘YOU BASTARD!’ He said, from his nest in a cloud
(white of course) and spat yellow tobacco rain on her
as she toiled in the cottonfields
‘I don’t want you to live with me!!’
He roared, roaring
His crown fell off
I caught a prong and kept it
When I look at myself in a tinsel leaf,
my unicorned head twists up
a little
It makes me think she may still sit,
smoking her golden crown, prongless
toothless
troubleless
boundless
beless
amless
noneless
the
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