Candide, or Optimism

The appetites of seven heroes splayed, dis-
emboweled in a last, eighth fit of agony.

Girls, crippled by wounds, spit blood
upon the ground’s swell of arms, legs,

and the breast-stained brains of dead villagers.
Candide watched a monkey skip rope

between two talking heads of the old guard,
whistling his thoughts for a whole hour’s acreage,

appealing for alms, or to be sent to a reformatory.
The minister’s wife peered from the hourglass’ window,

letting down three golden vines of her persian silk-
sudden hair. Meanwhile, a beggar emptied his sores

over a pot of silver or gold–a creature without wings,
one leg but a soul. His eyes rotted out to the end

of his nose, that then brushed against his mouth
by which the creature proclaimed to be the sweet

age of sixteen and the daughter of the Pope […]
A vessel for the multitude, borrowed and broken

space-time from a pop-up, paperback novel, that pop-
eye picture that lives inside us, opening then closing

a fractured umbrella, which holds butterflies.