To Margaret:

Voice of velvet, voice that cracks:
Drunken, reeling, thread of spit –
Relic of that ancient cult,
Of Fiction dispossessed, of
Structure as the common Lɪᴇ:

That, she’s found in a tipping glass.
Drinking deep, she flits, my Margaret,
‘tween curtains, veils,
The coloured panes of glass,
That distract the church-goer, who,
All in all, believes very little.

Flitting from distortion to another,
Each a different face, each herself,
Oh, then somebody else’s –
What it is, to choose a costume over the other!
In choosing one’s skin, one chooses their enemy.

If the world is shattered when the rum is gone,
Shall we weep?

Already, she is made blind,
Stupid, senseless,
The last drop is downed, and
She is transported –
Another brightness cleared –
All is one, all is all (said the baseless philosopher),
That is the Reveller’s one Tʀᴜᴛʜ.

One could say that her ankle
May twist or break,
Her voice be drowned,
Body placed in shallow waters,
For the gentle fish to tear asunder,
For the mother croc to feed her babes;
But the last veil will be dropped:
This is of no consequence.

O, the last veil will be dropped,
The last pane smashed to rainbow dust,
That is to lungs like razor.
Only then is she most herself,
Being all the selves, all the masks
Of joy or obligation.
(No questions are asked to stones,
Cool, unchanging; or to running water,
Rushing river, interminable drivel.)

The true face is a conjunction,
Of sawdust and steel, but
Crueller than sweet, sharp of
Cheek, gut of boiling bile.
Like Orlando, she was discovered a man
only after.