We would come to sit, communal band of outcasts,
Americans adrift in Copenhagen during the lost
Hemingway era, only more barren than that,
neighbors with fierce glaucoma eyes, the ball of the eye
a bulge, stray blue iris smoked within the white jelly,
absence of pupil,
or the flaccid buttocks on a cushion,
wheel rims rolling back, forward,
like the soft and easy rocking, back
and forth on a swing under a lazy spring
shiny day, only it wasn't that,
neighbors under the table
while the knight opens f3 for the Indian Attack,
Kingside, in the box of the lobby, a simple
white wash of steel girded walls
and laminated tile beneath on the floors,
a swift swap to the castle
where the daughter is held in the tower,
like a princess trapped beyond the pale, in the ring,
mad mother's lovers sit on the bed in the yellow
light of lurid nightmare in the background of an
echo of maroon, dulled to the brick red
destitution gathers about itself,
this one like a lost Rasputin running from Odessa of the broken
mind, vital capsules broken in trembling hands,
large and Slavic
he needs a Southern belle to curse the
flames which burn the antebellum way of life to ash
while plaster paris binds her legs,
its length from hip to foot, allowing him
insight to a murmured spell,
like the Sierra of a Sainthood's dream,
but with Lake Tahoe skipped for Donner's Pass
where cannibals dance to Swendenborg's pipes, increasing hysteria
toward heaven most high, no manna released from the clouds
only we are somewhere else than that,
lounge lizards of the underclass, the blinded black
man and invalid woman
both trying not to lose the Queen.
In concession to rank amateurs,
it takes the study of a lifetime to learn
the sequence of this grid can be the worst of human warfare,
creating masters while the serfs struggle on below against the tide.