These blandishments do not ensue us
From rhetorical magnificence.
Cold brilliance, complex genius
Serving the Mistress of Intimacy,
with more foreboding paws
than has the king of cats.
Wretched indulgence,
the unhealthiest of fantasies,
die not; it is, a certain relishment
alone that accounts.
Endless exuberant gusto
appeals and delights and terrifies,
and like a page turned vital,
transforms each line into death's dive.
All his audience can do
is rest and recharge
in long-winded Margaret's exorbitance,
nearly giddy in footing,
stumbling, and falling in
- a soul's respite.
But the empty vast smothers our wandering air,
and the sour ferryman returns us back
to the slimy bottom of the deep,
in defiant poetic bathos
by which the greedy kingdom of perpetual night
greets us.
Stranger still to be rendered incapable
of resisting his charm.
~Soph Laugh
