Tardago

Is it going to beg a colourful each moon?

Absolutely maybe, I read in the flight of the pelican –

they drink the blood of their young, I heard,

or the reverse in blue, or shades of blue.

Nowhere did it say you were half bat-shit crazy,

cunningly concealing your full-blown tardago

as you hovertrembled over cobblestones

like velum in the sleekthroat of the wind:

the vibrato of the last lines of Lord Jim,

pelican-like pelicans schmaltzing around

in the smokeguise of a snaking river.

Not once did you subtlemention your obsessions,

the stripes of coal-blue black tarcoal of your soul,

and you hopscotched till your shins hurt

and your mouth utterly wordparched.

Carbon-dated humour plastered on the wall of a cave

deepdown in the Larzac region of your heart,

that's what the mindspelunkers found

studied, edited, reported and archived,

patting their back and elbowing their sides,

unwondering what the use of the whole shebang was.

Yet the new moon came and your tardago with it!

The slyfooted auguries were caught unawares,

their nose too often skywards bent

while it should have haruspicised the omen.

You of all people know how to screenfathom,

how the tardago firesparks one into being –

you have been there. But you came back insane,

unfitted for shopwork or human relationships,

blind among the feathered, leading the pelicans

where they should have waitperched all along.

The new moon waned, and you and your tardago

went with it, thank god, never to be unseen again.

I am left herenow to lick my wounds and uncringing

slowly decipher murals in the candledark.