Using the First Person

The violet swirls, purple beams, and glowing coils of the stressed eye…
                                    I

                                    hasn’t presented a test –
as any personal relations manager won’t confess,
with bared knuckle on belt buckle, regardless
of regular rooking, in the compressed

conveniences of a sterilised Lutèce,
a hotel lunatic with the congress
of those kidnapped by bon vivant duress
where he’s glugging the larynx of a waitress

ill informed as to his more or less
ho-hum middle-class address
in the grandiose quorum of available egress
as much as he is of his bad press

for failing to guess
the backlash of her breasts
or the ennui under her exorbitant dress
or the hardscrabble jest

of her carefully concealed family crest,
or as any tapette thesp,
like a recently transgressed
kobold blessed

with the hokum of Hesse,
falls to his Cokes, makes an endearing mess,
demonstrates dexterous finesse
in his whittling away a Vogue whilst jimmying the jessed

bootstraps and lycraed contest
of inguen belonging to whomever acquiesced,
in this case, a success-
obsessed

dilettante dispossessed
of her formerly Andressesque
qu’est-
ce que c’est carriage, who once impressed


playing demure noblesse
in acclaimed drama, but nonetheless
deals with her failing zest
by declining salads to better reassess

the raffish fluoresce
of looted shooter, and aggress
her tchotchke-crotch in a nest
of eager fingers, and a runny yes,

                        II
  
like the yes
of the yes
men of le roi soleil that witness
the proud tumesce

of Lully’s operose abscess
that ultimately loses the exiguous interest
of the royal at rest
despite pulling out his best

moves, invests
in sweating sweat of wet juvenilia, obsessed
with gangrenous graces lest
he become a pest,

or Abelard’s pardon in a chess-
board of theologist-lust, a quest
to molest
the learned draws of the abbess

suppressed
in view of the repossessed
libido at Fulbert’s request
that no NHS

desk clerk could attest
to have ever reversed, his desire deliquesced
to make pious distressed
libertines and repress

the endless
almost soundless
cloistered tenderheartedness
of his mistress

                        III

not a contact lens length from the madness
of Munch’s smutch of a peeper, undressed
for crepuscular colours to coalesce,
but losing his sense of aqueous humour, id est

balling sludge on his mattress,
the watercress
of his androgenic mop, and the mucky vest
he won’t bequest

to invisible Fips, who can’t express
his primal want, and resents this absent largesse
as much as he would be unimpressed
if he acquiesced at the behest

of his depressed
maître de tristesse
to a work-in-progress
invite at the Freia chocolate factory – unless:

shy bones are free of politesse,
miners take up arms, and express
a want to pay a prophetess
in pickaxes, a minidress

means more than wage in the west,
hours outweigh stars, and progress
turns statesmen stale; the battledress
of all my I’s lined up, abreast.