Help—all beauty is in jeopardy!

Help—all beauty
is in jeopardy!

Struck
to the heart
by a crass angel,

dead-eyed
satellite of the gods of expedience
whose unquiet mumblings
have rocked our salience
to its foundations.

He’s a sensible soul,

with a pale tongue
for a hotdesk, and he’s
chunking his task
all over our mellifluous folklore,

and who is to preserve
our ephemeral fortress?

You know that place,

where the sunlight
hangs on the shadow’s
every word,
and the floors are carpeted
with smoked cigs,

and when you stride on them
you have a waltzy feeling,
I miss that feeling.

It makes me
make believe
that could dance,
and I love that feeling.

But who is to
defend the shadows?

We’re all sissified here,

the most hardened among us,
with gym-moulded carapace,
have hearts of Pea and the Princess,
and we’re no good in a fight.

And the sirens and the moths
are well-intentioned,
but they’re no good
for a fight.

And as for me—you
prayed for a seasoned warrior,
and all you got
was Blanche Dubois,
and she’s no good in a crisis.

Help—all brilliance is in peril!

The angel at their head

has eaten his own effluence
and multiplied,

his dour progeny,

with spreadsheets
for smiles, are
eating up the entrails
of our confidence.

And we are sinking fast,

and the sirens
are screaming,

and we are doing
what we do best
in a crisis,
weaving webs of
memory and fancy,

and singing
surreptitious songs
and dancing.

And the space
we have
in which to weave
webs and dance

is ever dwindling and
shrinking and subsiding.

And, as the space melts away,
our shoulders touch,

the gestures we make
to weave our webs and dance
grow ever smaller and smaller,

and our subtile songs
grow ever quieter
and quieter,

until you’d think
we’d turned to stone.

But we are still here,
moving imperceptibly,
vaguer and vaguer,

and singing songs inaudibly,
fainter and fainter,

and all grace, and
all finesse,
and all exquisiteness is

in danger.

Laurence Figgis, May 2024.