You look back on your life.
A halved centurion rises
to meet you storming
battle-weary with green,
wife-shaped shadows
of a nearly-new morning
that finds you holding hands unseen
as once again you lie
content unclean, with another:
the forbidden as thrillingly
yours as the girls on screen
and, in your mind’s eye:
they’re caught in adoring surrender
of the twilight idol
they perform illegal actions
as your coliseum falls.
And the knightly hero
they came here for ?
His promise of youth revisited -
(fast drives, masked reflective black
and rich enough to sell
an impossible future,
to bring a free girl back
from paradise
to the dull grey mouth of hell)
- is just a washed-out shell
of brick and plastic fantasy,
