We were scuffed up to our buffalos,
stuck in the crumb-encrusted morass of scum.
We stumbled numb, our legs all gone distant,
stung by the vines horny thorns, their insistence for
pucker-puncture kisses.
We three were all undone;
one unwound and slack, one bound by straps across the back,
one unlimbed but still limber, a most portable torso.
We made up a bounding thing:
all straps and snapping reins, metal rings and bulging veins,
the sweat-sodden miserable meat of our bodies
straining in the heat...
Damn bald we were, all wired together,
an abomination of plastic and leather and flesh
all strung up in the bag.
We the desert sentry, a blight on the sands of our birth, worse,
and well worth cursing, if only in verse.
Bubastos the Butcher, our girth,
Stout like a good ale, a kicker since birth!
He was our legs, he went up to our waist,
his torso long gone, his head longer misplaced.
Then Wornok the Smithy, our length,
lean like bamboo, but tripled in strength!
He was our guts and our arms and our chest,
and stuck with Bubastos, to whom he was tressed.
And lastly the head; that was me.
I was the speaker for each of us three.
I saw the world, heard the wind, smelt the smoke,
stuck like a punch-line at the end of the joke.
We each had our reasons, our prisons of blame;
Bubastos his wife, and Wornok the Law,
And I with my name.
We joined the Desert Legion;
we were joined by screws and bands.
By leather straps and bailing wire,
iron rods and coils of briar,
a patchwork man to roam a realm
that's naught but sand.
As one we went running, we ran for the shore
but the sea turned us back.
The tide, it was burning, and it stank like the devil
and it turned the skies black.
Then it rained in a hemorrhage,
like a menstrual flow,
drowning the thousands so thirsty below.
It drown them with rain it had held back for years;
it returned to them all of their sweat, piss and tears.
As for us we soon parted;
flesh is only so strong.
Bubastos went home, and Wornok went on,
I took the 8:15 flight to Milan.
Now I sell GRIT in the street-corner freeze:
would you like to buy a paper, please?