Fleance Candide

As mountains gloom and winter bites
A hardened man
Trudges the scarlet-crossed fields
Of an oriental desert -
...

So where are your mammoths?
Thundering, blundering into the ghosts

Of elephants; trumpet and tusks
...

Solemn faces stare blankly ahead
Like statues of ice; there is but a cold glare.
A look
...

Dusty jackets coughing with age;
Leathered bindings of royal red -
The pockmarked paper skin
Of wrinkled literati. A living atlas
...

I see a world of mud -
A spectacular spectrum confined to
Colours converging; merging into the muck.
But what do I care?
...

A stallion of the sea
Stalks the emerald waters
Of perfumed Caribbean;
Walks the lily-white crest
...

There -
The place where he once stood
As a shadow of a ghost
Grinning under a hangman’s hood.
...