for James Joyce Searching for words that thundered in the coal shuttle of the night and finding only a slow drizzle filling his mind, he left the dogs behind, the dogs and the bookstalls and the whores with all their frippery, too. Up from the slant crater of a drunken Dublin dawn he struck off across the plain headed for a world unspoken, while land crabs scuttled and muggers laid their bats against the wily skulls of lexicographers. He passed many a nubile lot on the downtrodden road, babes in the woods they were, all wound up and panting for the strung cock's crow, awaiting a city with paper towers slicing the clouds. He couldn't buy words here, yet found plenty for the taking, and always the slink and strut of coiled sensuality, unsprung, winding its knobby way through legs and legends and slumber. Even when he spelled it for miles he could find no clean words, only those shrouded with history, up from the bog and down from the dung heap, trailing threads, string, fluff, second-hand words, overused, underdone, parboiled thin words wearing overcoats and mufflers, drinking potions, sailing to France, doing it again, one more time and again words. Searching for some tracery of illumination to cast upon the immanent blackness, while the virgin boys fired their rifles amid the forests, hiding this way and that until their bodies were buried deep in the harsh harness of the burnt soil. When the wordmonger screams there is no way to mend the mind's wet slit. When the canon of dreams expels its complexity onto a stage of serious senses, thunder words resound. Across the riverrun from swerve of shore sinuous to breaking bend of bay, his matted thoughts filled the wounded sky with blood so dark it is almost red no more. *Appears in my collection Artifacts (Independent Legions,2018)