Who knows
but that your infuriating head
might only be full of fervent questions
where once there was desire, feverish,
like a summer swamp-born disease;
but now, spoiled hay.
And you will slave like a mindless thing
in your grim Germanic winter garden
full of stolid brassicas,
oblivious as a mummified man
without a pulse-
crucified like a mummers' messiah,
but grey and sour,
tainted with mould and its toxic spores.

Should I try to blindly unsleave
your outstretched arms,
pinioned, as they are,
against the extremes
of leaving and longing,
or clumsily unsheath the torso,
now winter-flaccid and over-stuffed
with last summer's straw,
all that I would find would be
two stakes
held together with an X of twine
where, once, the belly-knot
of your ripe fixation
was bound.