aloft above the ordering, the ancient infirmary.
Fuel maintained and mouthed without a thought,
all jewelled, all art unpricked, untouched, never taught
to the thousands of men facing threats of a flood
consisting of forgotten courage and blood.
Phantom eyes, jeapoardised, focused on the cause
not illusion but as close to foregone as the laws
that held together what is now an unravelled thread-
a bounty can be cast upon any man's head
and not just those that have unjustly others slain-
the innocent, the guilty, death always in vain.
Ambiguous lines drawn in the dirt, in the gloom.
The fleet that shattered and sank into circling doom.
An exhaustion so great that it is never past,
yet strange as the winds caught in the low mast.
Amid a loud conscious, abjectly monotonous
and flat-bottomoned brooding, a static rottenness
smothers all space, cements every door,
until the air is thick with scurvy and all feet are sore/
Wharfside pigeons don't sing but starve in the sun.
The ocean's depths has limits, this toil has none
They do not dare to disclose it, if they do know
anything true about this formation, to stay or go,
what is lost and what is won, and if it's the latter
what it is worth and why it might matter.
[Inspired by a cut-up technique using The Dynast by Thomas Hardy as the corpus text]
