From one hard case decamped long since
and from brute life
part accidie part frenzied work
I've come in these late years
to read the wise

and learned queer things

like the documented true
fact that having spurned
many courtly and passionate suitors
Elizabeth One felt in decline
she had been on the whole too coy

often now for cautionary paradigm
I think about The Queen

and Hatty
sometime Anglican and spinster nurse
who high on her mantle shelf
kept a lithograph of Jesus
in a little crown of thorns

in age she got rake thin
would blurt wild curses
smoke stogies drink neat gin
once painted a red mouth on
and tried to rape the postman

then died        mad