There’s just a faded denim flag, a tattered magazine, some plastic party picks and a pair of someone’s pockets. A pile of pillaged padding and a pouch of vintage pintos, with a purse of sullied pearls and a sack of snapped spaghetti straps. A basket of sundered sundries and a box of battered bowls. Moonlight spilling from the wounds in wooden walls and a cup to catch the drips and a sponge to mop the drops. Pots to hold the pans and some cans to hold the cutlery, with rubbery boots of red and some scullery rags in the rack room, slack cloth and slashes and slits up the sleeve and socks full of sorrow. There’s raucous ragtime rumba rolling past on radials, and the garrison gunning the rails into the fog-bespotted bogs, but there’s nothing here to bunt with, so the time has come to bounce. To bound in a beeline back to the honey hive, far from the money pit. Yeah. Back to the she-shed, down by the seesaw, where the wailings of whales and of waves are waiting in whelks on the shelf and there only are boats for the gravy, all of it gilded and guiltless. Everything scallops and peplum. A garden of garland with garb for the grabbing, so it’s back to the fortress of furbelow. Like a fly in the traps of Venus.

Karl Roulston is a poet and blues harp player whose written works can be found in various great weather for MEDIA print anthologies and George Wallace-edited e-journals.