I put my mask on, while an agent and his informer
sweat on the corner of Zimmerstraße,
paperwork propagating like plasmids.
The Centre for Data Analysis smells like jasmine.
Badroulbadour talks long and hard about her lad in Agrabah, the has-been.
Attend to your own mask before your child fetches up in
Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, yelling
“An ‘aypenny a skin, blacking!”
No admittance without a mask, a Yangtze water boatman,
skating on the sun’s reflection,
chasing the almighty Robert Dollar.
My face is plastic Orient squalor,
holla, holla.
Why don’t you have your mask on? A horror
of porcelain in a landfill,
where Pierrot picks at the bones of an appropriation bill,
the finest carcass at the carnival. I wipe my mask-face clean,
my face that is Jim Carrey-green.
There is a resounding Noh, in a playhouse no longer open,
in which a feudal Lord Fauntleroy, with Christian devotion,
tinsels tonsils with acetaminophen.
My face devolves like healthcare,
reminding me faces are what our masks wear.