The taskmaster endures through shifting quarters the
darknesses which nightly fall upon us,
foregoing ambition’s voluptuous Circe.
A shaker of fetters, will he not scuff his heels,
unable to slow the wheeling grindstone?
Yet the waylaid hero careens through the digits
and the royal surfaces to which they adhere.
No, I would never play out my aces,
only to be rewarded on a naught’s taut noose.
This hand is best played on a circumspect table:
thus would I warn yet the safest bidder.
I, who wait here among flatterers for that day
when – in the proud conflations of moment and tense,
freed upon the poise of a latter noon –
you’ll come home from Argos, twice in a single day.
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