The Goddess' clergy, sliced, are rendered prone,
through residues of so-called "natural lives"
(no more man-made than mine, in other ways),
to affectations of unsubtle sorts.
In social-climbing mode, these sacred castrates,
obese, emaciate, or in between,
will tone it down, attempting to affect
effete aestheticism. They aspire
to rarefied estates of wealthy pathics
who, swathed transparently in silken gauze
with corals pink as sphincters spangling hems,
have draped their recta 'round the Palatine
since accession of the mad incendiary.

Medusa's head swings by reptilian braids
that cinch about the bright-pigmented fist
of Perseus, sea monster-petrifier,
her face a revelation in egg tempera
of every horror that jabs into or screams
out from the eye: uncanny evidence
of famous Grecian Cydias's brush
upon a terracotta slab...

...in the banquet hall, alone, I cower, swoon
before Phorcys's daughter, stare her down,
though slowly being aged by the bare sight--
by her sight, rather, perforating me ...

"And wonder you well might,
Aceronia--my love, my number-one,
my favorite member of my entourage,
whom I esteem so infinitely higher
than any mere Illyrian, unfree,
with bad complexion--how a bug physique
like Graptus's could flay a witchy skull.
Let me assure you, he got well behind it,
up to the crackly wrists. Imagine that,
his own tribeswoman. What disloyalty!
Self-hating much? Oh, Aceronia, please!
His sweet great auntie! ...

The acephalic bugaboo, the witch
I thought we'd left behind, crownless, interred
so shallowly beneath Illyrian turf
(or, rather, muck) in astral form swims here.
Desirous of her shinglebob's return,
she gnaws my kneecap with a dunning chant

In a reddened tidal puddle just next door
is spasming Graptus. Mistress squats and holds
her dying slave as though already dead,
while striking poses, as per usual.
From her impersonation repertoire,
this time, Geb's daughter, Isis, gets the part.
She's grieving for her husband, defunct son,
or both, whichever. (These Ægyptìans
aren't easy to interpret.) ...

Her torso doubles as her face, no head
on which to wedge a wig; and, terror to tell,
her nipples peer like eyes, umbilicus
a nose with snaggled nostrils ill-equipped,
the orifícium úrethrae extérnum
a mouth that all too readily descends
to vulgarism ...

My lamentation's understated, Stoic,
nor moistly do I squawk, like a capon
who flits about the sin-beleaguered city
of my despicable nativity,
abashèd not to crave, solicit, seek
chastisement, as it's sternly meted out
by reborn Messalina, Night's Anarch.
Her hips, strapped, wield a tastelessly outsized,
grain-dyed Pompeiian-red leathern baubón,
with artisanal smoothness sunken-stitched,
anointed in the olive's intimate unction.
Some sediment's unstrained, by paradox,
to lend a friction-hint, perhaps promote,
in teaseful modicum, internal chafes
of membranes, ill-advised, unless...

... My fellow runagate
comes rising up on legs like obelisks.
She brushes bushels of crushed crystals wedged
between two pumiced buttocks. She thumbnails
a hundred oyster shells, each countersunk
into the dropsied dimples of her thighs.
De-gritted now, she peers into the body
of land we've somehow to negotiate.
What towns with colonnaded libraries
might bustle yonder? ...