Too much of my life so far has depended upon dressing-gowns,
Some sort of ‘string-theory’ tied by myself wax-thumbed
Amongst our handmade mélange of sawdust, gold, gunpowder

Wrapping your old whatever in brown paper or broken linen
Plates with crests, double-barelled, sawn-off, lost of course
Off course on Vietnamese coasts repeatedly, mapless, creased

Thus padded, padding (bare sole to Afghan) puffing Cohibäe
My tassels swinging luckily and nobody has ever been older
Than me, or younger, I guess I once so wished it –

Like polished concrete under-pied or Almanach de Götha even
(Whose umlaut we doubt as we despair of half its entries here)
Unthumbed – whisky echo – by regal paw for balconies aglow

With what goes-down, “street” for the sun itself, on alp lips
There blue to pink before a vaster twinkle of a grid
Latticed, netted, spread hence in the sense of surely a valley

One-by-one they each come on in private Christmastide
Pinprick glow as if a pin pricked this map of avenues
Awash, surged mit electricity atingle to all didgit’s tip –

Whilst I myself, pompous so, am not doing anything –
Other than otherwise worrying the worry-beads while pacing
Plain wood floorboard planks warm to flesh from full

Days of blaze aslant across mere tumbled marble balconies
My almost Emperor’s tent-flap (gifts!) floats asunder freshly
And thunder, oh, our old stage villain, thunders north reliably –