Plagiarism Dreams

We met at the end of the party

when all the lights were fouled

with drink and even the self-titled

Ouzo Animal was yawning in protest

at the Bacchanalian revel in which

no member is not drunken. I sipped

soda water from a cracked glass,

refrained from removing my jumper

while a twelve-year old Bob Dylan

with a voice like Hank Williams

stood silently in the corner stirring

vinyl motes with his fingertips,

a younger more cherubic version of you,

Prince Valiant or some other slender

sword-bearer infiltrating the childhood

of your celebrated prettiness preparing you

for a lifetime of repetition and inaction

till your appearance in the space between

the bar and our oversexed pinball machine

conjured foxes, chickens and all the abjured

mythologies of early twenty-first century

mating games, obliterating the desire

for friendship that skulks behind the false

advertising of every sexual advance.

It’s only men who think that they and women

can’t be true, a self-serving dialect delivered

by an absent emperor, your king in waiting,

so charred, so easily bruised. Poor Scorpio

clichés of speech overcome in me

and reinstituted as a kind of structure.

The possibility of being immortal is something

I will have to give up on. Scattered to the pigs

in the rent-free cage conversing in a language

that is not so different from the one you deride.

In which all the worlds tetrahedron and give up

on the cause of the Frisky Mothers of Bullaburra

now entwined, night squad of rabbits waiting to chew

your stumps to cavities in an externalized display

of waking fictions. I decay and suffer a mannish twinge.

The first of the plagiarism dreams reclaims my heart

with false dice. All behaviour is suspicious.