Cleopatra
A wrinkled jotter page is what’s to hand
While making poetry for you. The sheet
Is hardly right for writing sonnets, grand
Emotions, vivid passions, all replete
With love and other tortures and disease
Of heart and synapse. Love lacks tomorrow,
The past, and future, more an evening breeze
Of sweat, but looms, a Kilimanjaro
Of now, a prophet calling down a large
Scar ripped through psyches, or a huge Great Rift
Valley, Queen Cleopatra’s fragrant barge
Hacked free from barnacled moorings, adrift
Towards depth charges anchored beneath our aches
And making breasts lean longingly towards snakes.