Alpswise in its white ruin, when the workers had the lead carbonate

perfected at Rhodes, shavings of lead over a bowl filled with vinegar

I took the History of Make-Up pilfered I’m told from the State

of Vermont archives inside of my blue fox great coat

like Cagliostro perfuming the air about him, who’d seen I’m told

the ark and the crucifixion, who’d therefore seen hence or whence time reduced

beyond his May-made London corroborant in its borage and white wine reduced

both ingested to live forever, and as if to make these living hours carbonate

I’d taken a poker stand of last resort in saying the tell’s already told

suspending en plein air several custodians of ginger hair, euphemized as a “medium vinegar”

colour in Ireland where it’s a common pick-me-up in the same ilk as get your coat

you’ve pulled, the country both sensitive in terms of hair colours and matters of state

where you could float between one and another red-flamed castigated woman in a state

of matter misheard by Simply Red as mater for whom being ginger was to be reduced

to simply red. The poets say instead carmine coral ruby as their mordant to help coat

a painting on lust beyond the more pedestrian their hair is red carbonate

rock with cobalt-bearing dolomite, my lover likewise complaining of my recent vinegar

jaunts (midnight, Walmart, heavy-breathing, huffing, banned). The lawyer told

me that research for a poem on some painting wouldn’t hold up in court and I told

him hey man that some painting is my The Punishment of Lust, and in this state

lust is the same as blackening one’s teeth with oak galls and vinegar.

Once fashionable too, my lover petitions my own country’s government to have my influence reduced

equivalent to a silent-soft ginger-such-dreaming hush blown through a field of white carbonate

where drowsily the censors suggested to at least adorn each figure with a drooping coat

and the late evening of the heart tops the mountains to take on that sunlight coat

and the figures repeat again as if to prove a tale’s as only old as the time from when it’s last told

and some sage advice: that under the aegis of the broken a man should cry to fill fractures with carbonate

my crown instead alp-flowers, herbariums, small seaways of violet from which I scorn to change my state

with that of kings, although in retrospect I’d too rather it wasn’t further reduced.

I promise I’ve cleaned the blood from the mountain sleds with vinegar.

I’m sorry, I mean that the mountain air remains unseasoned without vinegar.

I too plan on escaping out in a cloak with its sleight-of-hand a resemblance to a foreshortened coat

though as a plan I’ve been caught out before on my own self-promise and reduced

to the also-ran painters and also-ran poets scorning the tailors that told

them that to clothe the red and floating lost was beyond their ken. The local state

government has reopened the mountain museum with duelling exhibits on carbon dating and carbonate

where I learnt that the oldest vinegar dated to this or that, and also have been told

to tell you that still with no coat and frozen those mountain reds lie still in state

reduced forever, the censors blotting their eyes for fear they’re dotted lead carbonate.