It could be that nothing is sacred to me,
or it could be that I have seen enough of altars and alder groves.

A thyrsus is only a cock, after all
and a holy virgin only a girl who won’t call.

Let’s go ragged as old coats tattered by a wind
whose playfulness makes love to the idea of apocalypse.

Carry on, carry on, I feel it in the popping gears of my heart
that rattletrap old box of bones.

Some comeuppance it was, howled loud as a rabbit’s hop
and half as deadly, some great vindication—

all your books lost at sea but the painting I had given her
for her birthday still hanging around.

She had wanted it. Love will leave you it said without prelude,
how macabre, and she wanted it.