1667 c/o Clam Simmons

John Milton

When young I was famous for great hair
it grew as I grew handsome in appearance
At school I trained to master the rapier’s grip
I wielded the bit like Attician wit. My fertile
mind was perpetually agape ready to devour
the works of Latin as if English were classic
tongue. My sails have been swayed by tempting
breezes, the courting bellows of pandemonium
but the long arms of horde’s approval could not
pull me away from pressing into the dominant
catalogues of thought. I lost decades to the raptures
of discovery, slurping through vellum
like a drunkard at the bunghole. The lucubration
‘twas epick, the long journey of learned reverie
required eternal squinting by candlelight
the glow of my pearls diminished to a desperate
pawing as if my eyes could beg Phoebus to hold
still the setting sun’s chariots, to suspend
the horses that ride into the dusk. Raving,
I spent dark seasons contending with bedlam’s
urges resigning myself to the manacles
of shadow. Mercifully my daughters read
to me, nursing the poison from my depraved state
feeding me, sliced chapters of the familiar
loaves of my conviction. Sometimes at night
after working the office of dictation I snuff
the wicks so the house may swallow a portion
of my daily fare. I imagine in the momentary
yoke of dull faculty we share lamentation.
Our weak body reminded of the strong judge,
who, with shorn locks and pricked eyes
supplicated for renewed agency. Unsatisfied
with mere petition, Samson pressed out to topple
the pillars, binding no strange foxtails in the service.
Juxtaposed, my conquerors are immaterial restraints
I struggle to teem through hallowed shutters
to escape the hindrance of my immediate cell,
to capture a script of the fall before the great release.
Finally exhausted, I might see Eden in the sequel.

1608 c/o Jemima Louise Johnson

Apple mists

Both of them were puffed out with the pride of Friday evening on the other’s arm. The street,
not friend of such a naked show, made sure to offer all the incongruous mess required to
equal if not overpower the soft-stuffed-plush display. His sour manufactured sent intended
as a paragon of manly strength leaned heavily against each mucus membrane met along
their half blind limb entwined and weaving way.
Sex echoed in the lento fall of her eyelids, her noseholes stretching wide to suck his smell. If
not for the ash-confetti thrown up by a faceless and unthinking coat sleeve, grasping for its
equal portion of the city air, her curling spine might have finished tracing that arc which
seemed to pull the past up through her abdomen to graze her engorged air sacs. Longing
for a red man to hold them captive so as to indulge in a public display, instead she falls to
contemplation of the thong biting with playful insistence at her freshly showered crack.
He had chosen this place as a means of escaping the well worn groove they had settled into
and, though it was his younger brother’s find, he judged, since discretion is the better part of
valour, he might let her speculate as to the plan’s history. Following behind her satisfyingly
formed thighs peeping through the slitted dress he half trips his forgotten foot over the step.
For a dazed moment he fights to regain his full height and tear his gaze from the vulnerable
softness of her crooked knee-pit. A woman with purple hair spilling over a guitar sings that
she doesn’t believe in everlasting love. The friends that have come to see her are happy
and the rest of the room is at least polite and waiting for its turn to watch and play.
Sweet fluids have settled into now congealing pools on the mosaic of the bar. A gruffly
attractive young man takes his turn at the microphone and opens with a showy cover of
‘Grace’ which barely registers with our pair who toil with eyes and elbows for the round that
he will win the fight to pay for. A harassed, grey looking barmaid meets their eyes straining
for her attention. She asks them who was first. They smirk. He orders their drinks.
God! Sometimes I think I could just rip into his face with my teeth, she muses, and perhaps
only the familiar pain at the ends of her stretched and strapped-up arching feet means that
she can dispel her gnawing lust. Her straining fingers grab at his hyacinthine locks.
“For fucksake, Evie, are you trying to pull my hair out!”, starting back massaging his scalp.
God! Sometimes those eyes shit me right up!
In a shake she fingercombs her blond tresses and leans against his manly bulk to stare up at
him.