I Such repetition! Pacing endlessly with her arms clenched and twisting, A sorry attempt at exercise to ease the boredom; fingers sandpaper- yellowed From too many old yesterday pages. Cosmetic literature Meant to pretty up the mind and hide those pesky disfigurements -- To force outcries of More! and Sleepless!; she reads hidden Skittering pages under thick covers, repeating words soundless As though they are dying treasures. They are dying treasures. II Dying treasures, and old monarchs with backs stooped and curved Like death-scythes, where the form indicates the fate. Too long, too old, and they die out for the younger king, Bland and colourless-brief. A story about kings, then, She decides, to honour the fading one who wriggles on his throne, And she all shrouded in a dirty quilt is a woman in a tapestry, Watching and not watching, eyes glaring past the real. III The real is not real. In her knit-woven figure she sees Only this entrancement -- enchantment -- and articulate men go hungry and are impaled And her finger has a papercut sympathy wound. The words die with the knights, Useless, coughing undignified on the carpets. Sanguine bloodrush, pain-- No better way to say that in her limited vocabulary! The pulp-pages Enhance her. Fealty, for plain-faced kings. Has she sworn it to someone worse? Words drain. IV Drain out like blood, ran-through blood, and her hands stained yellow still, Too bad no jaundice comes from swordplay or wordplay. More wounds, puddling, coagulating, escaping through stone-cracks. Rampart, temperament, lunule, Embrasure. Embrace? Sure, she thinks, wanting that changeable king Though he only watches with cool illiterate detachment and does not See the walls. In her heart she loves this uncaring destroyer best.