Homage...

I present you

with an imaginary book.

Affixed inside is a small card,

seemingly a carte de visite,

upon which is printed...



HOMAGE

DE L'AUTEUR,

ABSENT

DE PARIS

...


*     *    *    *



You notice

(& with your usual discretion

forbear to say)

that I am strangling

a dead horse

in this study.


Yes, it definitely appears

to be a photographic study.


*     *    *    *


You notice the horse

is politely dead



like God or Mark Twain.


*     *    *    *


You believe you see

a likeness of the author

superimposed over the horse's face,


a cheap, early-eighties video effect.


This is an annoyance in your day,


you whose main concern


was looking natty

for the Emperor,



or certain annoying members

of the Emperor's retinue.


*     *    *    *




You were preparing an appropriate & appealing form

of rectal salts for the Emperor,


but realized you might get stuck

giving this lagniappe,



these salts of a hyaline blue,


to a random member of the Emperor's retinue.


Or worse--

possibly a member of the clergy.


*     *    *    *



This is your greatest worry today,


and I have felt it deeply within my body,


as though the fear at how you revere your vanity

and the vanity with which you revere your fear



were somehow twin brothers born to posts

of unequal Greatness



in this Greatest of Wishful Kingdoms,



this Kingdom of the Greatly Wishful Ones.


*     *    *    *


I watch you standing there,

holding that jar of hyaline blue salts,


and think of the Innocence of Palestine.


I also fold sanitary napkins,

while I write a poem addressed to you.


*     *    *    *



I salute you in your entrepreneurial neuroticism,


and I apologize for setting flame to at least two thousand


cantilevered bridges you will shortly be crossing.


Forgive me, cherished one.

Their grandiosity and meekness irked me.


I have, however, lit the fire beneath the samovar

and am salting the kippers even as I write this.


Trust me on This.


The Tsar did not die in Vain.




xo


Your Rulicious Chevalier