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Bug-Eyed Flapper

'I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance,
and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.'
     - Louise Brooks

And I am self-taught
in being habitually drunk
   - I dot the sun in puddles,
  dancing attendance on the ambrosia beetle
  where it sidestrokes in the trough.
  Clashing hot spot waves
  until high summer dusts the ground.
  An insect scuttles.
  Humidity dissolves to cloud.

  On thundercloud nine
  of slurred speech and hypnotic pills
  there are menacing flare-ups.  The sun's outpouring
  walls up, in a twinkling, the dark.

  I dream of the shocking-pink incircle
  of an eclipse,
  an eardrum to the solar wind
  wheezing to emptiness.
  Einstein said,
  'energy equals mass
  times the speed of light, times the speed of light.'

  Hydrogen, tail-chasing electrons
  and helium trickles the afternoon.
  Superdense like this wine,
  gas fizzes to the curved surface.

  I act my way through prompt box theatrics
  under limelight - infra-red, x-rays
  and osmotic ultraviolet,
  for my public to stare at
  in night-blind cinemas.
  A quaff douses the sizzling cauldron
  that lies at the heart of a star.

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