Athena's Graveyard

                                       I am the grape snatched from the vine,
                                       pressed by the wills of fate.
                                       Bled of all knowledge and spoilt,
                                       drunken and mad by my own wine.

Cautiously, he falls in strides of levity. Silver trinkets of lifeless charms, swollen in blood bruises of the eyes. "I am graft," he says. But daft assertions of a purple queen of ghosts are fed with wires: crooked and unforgiving. And so he crushes the orb of knowledge. Mauve and red, sticky stream of cyanide. And Miriam still bangs her timbrel, with ecstatic hands that hide it, whole and unplucked.