I can feel the tense of your arm on my waist, I can feel our paces beating black the earth. The blessing of a growling night sears as in a pouting yearn I close myself from the blinding lime trees and their attendant cobras, clutch my ears to escape your howling navel and scream happily in a house of wattle and peppermint. So in a hat askance smirk I live in the cracks of teeth and pick the remnants of roast dove from the white, white earth. Glimmer and rag and Charleston down the cobbling road, Romany braids and a red scarf flapping like a rotund wing. And why two-step when there is eight, sixteen, thirty-two? Dance, dance , in your little red shoes. Dance until your bones show through and your heels crack.

Why paint a path down my sternum leading all the way to womb in tempura, in egg-paint, in salivating gold if you cannot touch it or me though your hand comes through a curtain of elephant eyes? When you do not have the strength to reach so far? All this I do for you and yet your hand does not extend. But all manner of things will be well, I shall remain your black-haired mistress of juggling fire, leather-clad and laughing like an accordion. I sleep beneath a bottle of ether like raspberry cordial, all swimming and oily and sweet. Drink me, drink me, drink me and my lips will be on yours like a licorice vise. Smile under me, pretty, the smile of a thousand horsemen on the steppes, of swords and bucklers and drinking-horns, your Middle-English grin and my Vernacular Tongue.

Jailbars slap secular breasts like slabs of stone and from the sky hoarfrost beats down on grass like a giraffe's thumb. Up, up, up, and the eucalyptus is tickling behind my ear, tannic and bright, lisping night and its yellow beard all brambled with stars. Is that you whispering or do I simply want it to be, want you to have learned by now your first verb, your first participle, your first holy noun? Why still are you silent as though your lips were burned away? Cry out, child, give me your kinetic stanzas of maple breath, birch-bark and willow wands wrapping the muscular tongue, the prizefighter tongue, the fifteenth-round bloodied. But it is not so, it is not. You are still and shivering, poor lamb. Open wide, open that pearled mouth, give me your sweating teeth. Beautiful Messenger, messenger, with jasper-gold feet, heavy on the clouds like an apple corer, punching heaven with your heels, bring me a cluster of vervain for my blood pressure, and ginger root for my kidneys. Bring me chamomile tea for my throat, sweet one, and I will swallow you whole.

Enter the watchtower quiet as murdered mice, step on the stairs with gobbling feet, greedy mouths in our soles, eating the rock like chunks of cheese. Follow, follow, if you can, and breathe the acetylene fog. Come! Come! Come! Hop! Skip! Jump!