0
Speeding along where the shadows fly,
an amulet clutched in the pocket of his Arcteryx,
Dagger stopped before the edge of the glen
to quietly observe the gnome atop the berm.

1
'Mayhap he knows of my brother who went MIA,' thought Dagger,
only to be spotted by the gnome with a malevolent smile.
"Listen, mick," it began, "the apocryphal is real.
"Everything said in the name of juche is true.
"By the word of elohim be damned this world,
"where none but the chosen may find xanadu.
"Surely you be too ignorant to have read
"of the influence on the mainland of the junkers,
of Germany? The godlessness of power---"
it sputtered on vituperatively.
As a Gloucerstershireman,
Dagger felt a germ of assent
just before noticing the gnome was decked in garbage.
Surely this wasn't the famed rejuvenator?
Meanwhile the gnome crouched lower over its jenkem.
"Gah!
"*zooms like a MiG*
"I'm the live soulja!
Dagger, to expurgate the scene, shaded his eyes and sighed.

2
Given the point he was at in his journey, Dagger was dangerously fazed.
Wouldn't it be simpler to regard the gnome as so much fugazi?
Dagger thought of his town's stolid glazier.
Mysticism is glam, he'd have dismissed.
The world is like an aged cheese, stinky but good.
'Yes,' Dagger thought, 'this guy is fucked.'
The gnome hurriedly wiped the shit from its face.
"Listen, cracka," it began,
an exuberant grin on its cracked, tiny face.
"God is a rearward movement,
"a contraction that preserves forevermore."
In a flash Dagger saw this was Biggavelli's cousin,
speaking truths clearer than any glass his glazier'd ever blown.
"Do you---a grunt, gone miss--" Dagger stuttered,
only to be drowned out-- "The commandment:
"Heavy lieth the responsibility on the chosen few."

3
Suddenly Dagger's thoughts turned to his dearest Divya,
of one autumn evening they'd piked to the valley to root out truffles.
One in particular seemed fed of the roots of Yggdrasil,
near the stream where Effexors flowed like fish eggs.
"FTW!" he had exclaimed,
as ineffective an endearment as he'd ever uttered.
The bittersweetness of memory against his months of isolation left Dagger addled.
His thoughts turned to last week's battle in the abandoned FIFA stadium.
In the driving rain the crowd appeared granulated,
and Lil Durk some kind of possessed water sprite.
His Chiefz rooted and hooted heartily,
come down from the oil rigs and unfinished condominiums
---if not jail---
to cheer until the foreign ref declared, "Excessif!"
As a Druze Dagger had no saints to pray to.
He was on his own, the poor deckman.
In his memory the fight is pale as a facsimile,
yet still as clear as the blue of the sky after the storm passed.
Dagger won, of course, as firmly as he used to pull the oars.
The game was over,
having broken as bitterly as a fever.
As a reward Dagger was granted some soil from Eden.
Straightening up from his reverie, Dagger thought, 'Glazier be damned---'
"Gnome, do you know the location of the Gucci sword?"

4
"Let me tell you an anecdote from the death of Pan," it began.
'Jeepers,' thought Dagger, 'this guy's a pagan.'
"The sky was mournful but mellow that day.
"Pan awoke unusually early to set himself at his musical ekphrastic.
"God himself was the enemy, revealed to stamp out
"the inebriate who'd fostered so many bastards.
"Ambulatory and energetic, Pan was in a devilishly good mood.
"His face was fresh as spring leaves,
"unknowing of the haxors who lurked in the brambles.
"Convinced of solitude, Pan chiefed a bit of reefer.
"Out the assassins sprang and then began the gunbattle.
"Pan flitted around the bullets like a gnat,
"exuberant in the face of death, as was his mode.
"With poise, to jeer, Pan slowly the smoke exhaled;
"though no gladiator, he comported himself well.
"Finally, as the bullets pierced him, with a sudden frown, he jizzes---
"leaving a sticky film on his assassins.
"All this should be familiar to you from the state exam,
"and is preserved in your glazier's finest glass."

5
Dagger cast down his eyes and noticed a flyer advertising a regatta.
It was three and he still hadn't ate.
'Perhaps I should ask the doge instead,' he thought wearily.
'Surely it's gathering dust in some courtier's attic.'
Overhead a pink mesh cloud drifted by, leaving the ground dappled.
"Shuffle a few feet to the left," said the gnome. "I have glaucoma."
Dagger shivered, fatigued, or---was that the passing of a ghost?
"No," interjected the gnome, "that was Zephyrus."
"You can---" "Yes, I read minds, and yours is pretty janky.
"Now give me a ducat and I'll explain why I told you that story."
Dagger obliged. "Since you were born by caesarean,
"you're too weak-kneed to hear this as a fatwa.
"So here's the cheapened remix.
"Reason's imperium has no watchguards,
"exhibitive of a general softening since the death of Pan.
"Now before you start yessin' me on this,
"let me remind you of your days on the gunboat.
"Don't misconceive my intentions as charitable, I know you hardly know.
"Though without hope still you rowed, yes, and hard?
"So it goes with those randy, handy goats.
"It was in dutiful despair that Pan let off that final glop.
"He---*farts*---oops, I'm gassy---he---"
but the gnome broke down in a fit and giggled.
"Listen, this is no gem
"---or if it is, it's a synthetic one.
"Feel gipped?
"The point is, only Christ can save you.
"In the new world empire of love,
"The feud with nature is ended; God has won."

6
Now I admit all this has gotten a bit heady.
Perhaps rather than nodding off the burghers in here might simply leave.
Though I be in my civvies,
let it be known I know a thing or two about the military's Hegel,
as the wunderkind of my village invited all this way to speak.
Let it be known too the indeterminacy of this performance is intended,
in keeping with the development of this auspicious ship.
Allow us now a pause to ask elohim how best to continue---
ignoring the rude guffaw from quarters unfit to mention.
Though I be stuffed to the gills with the court's lamb and kale and honey,
I shall continue. Behind the guardrail appeared a zaftig babe,
her curves egregious.
She was, in a word, chewy.
Dagger knew his fiduciary sponsor would not approve,
and that such types tended to be bibulous.
The gnome, meanwhile, was aghast.
Always the cajoler, he readied a screed against love.
But I see this turn has failed to awaken the clerk.
Allow me a minute to contemplate the banners' glyph for inspiration.

7
May we aspire to its freedom from grammar.
Now as the lights once again begin dimming,
I duly return to my tale.
Like Xerxes before the tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam,
in this babe Dagger beheld the zeitgeist manifest.
'If only I could crack her like a geode,' he thought,
'with a single swing of my club, and see her crystal interior.
'Cuz everybody know I got that good dicc, mmm yea.'
"She's a doper!" the gnome burst out,
stepping forwards between the two.
"Beware of treading in a foxwarren.
"Think of your grandfather, stranger.
"Chastity is the glue that holds the hero together;
"woman without child is a welt upon the world.
"Once dissolute no amount of epoxy can put the hero together again."
Now as you can see this be no eklogue,
though that might go over better with your ganja.
Back in our tale, the gnome rose on his toes and bellowed:
"I WARN YOU, TRAVELLER, THE LIGHTEST TOUCH IS FATAL."

8
And the thousand gods clapped, and clapped, and clapped, and clapped, and clapped.

9
I see that section was a bit more GABAnergic;
I'll try now to avoid too many Edwardian notes,
like the babe's pink-and-gold epaulettes
(this, after all, ain't the GRE).
With half a heart, Dagger gamboled in a figure-eight around the two,
as the babe began to suggestively churn butter.
Famous as a withdrawn, ironized flaneur
back in his native Gloucerstershire,
Dagger found himself weighing his temptations,
drawing up every repressed gene in his body.
"Help!" cried the gnome, "we are about to lose the hero!
"Someone frag him!" Little did it know,
Dagger intended to anneal his desire into fortitude.
"Glug-a-glug-glug, rub-a-tug-tug," he crooned,
"Lizzy gets me dizzy in a tizzy til I fizzy-fug-fug!"
Vibrating with sexual energy, Dagger spun about
to catch the chick and the gnome's reax.
Each befitting each, the babe turned purple and curtsied,
while the gnome got as chilly and barefaced as the crags.
And then, as if called by some heroic ESP,
there appeared the heavenly extension.

10
From a jagged crack in the stony ground
arose a silver, lengthy gecko
and it began to speak: "Take action warily, my lord, lest
"you become just another goatfucker made ridiculous by the death of Pan.
"Have you no education? or in fact too much?
"Lust is as natural as a spotted dalmatian,
"as fremd a species as there ever was."
At this the gecko became quite animated,
and attempted by way of demonstration to fuck a rosy stone.
Like the famed, damned coffee plantations of Ceylon,
or the insurance industry of Des Moines,
the gecko was a spent nation without an EMF.
And thereupon from the mists appeared the healer.

11
Yet another intervention did Dagger no favors;
against the ergonomics of the hero's journey, things had become quite cramped.
As nonplussed as a katydid with snapped wing,
or greenthumb ESL student,
or axegrinder with broken stone,
Dagger was taken aback as the healer intoned: "Smoke this DMT, child."

12
In a strange way, this struck Dagger as quite germane.
"Just don't doxx me while I'm vulnerable," he said,
as he leaned in to take a puff. Thereupon appeared Gwern,
flanked by two white doves representing elohim.
Drilling down into the vision as in a game of Digdug,
driving on as when he was a cockswain,
Dagger reached for the carafe of plasma that manifested before him,
that... that... my, I've forgotten this line. In any case,
soon stumbling everywhere, punchdrunk and giggly,
staring at the bit of green gunk on his fingers.
'This smells of coriander,' he thought,
reminding him of the festivities around his sister's marriage banns.
Then Ganesha whooshed in upon a mouse,
bathed in the pink light of a thousand dawns.
"Are you... the evangelion?" asked Dagger.
"What you axt me?" said Ganesha, at which our hero fainted.

13
When he awoke (still intoxicated) he was on Mt. Olympus at the foot of Zeus.
Hera boomed over him, "Can I get you some fixins, chile?"
Framed against the clouds on a distant mountaintop Dagger discerned a ziggurat.
'idgi,' he thought, 'I don't speak Greek? and neither is that?'
At this Hera stooped over him and encompassed him in her vagina,
which was lined with currency from every land.
Suffocating, with no means of communication,
Dagger saw no means forward from this junction.
Still, he had to admit, it was pretty grand.
Soon he caved and came, at which, through the walls,
he heard Hera jeer, "Son, that's bupkis.
"You sex like an American." Spat back out,
Dagger could feel hardly less well-established.
Startled, he reached for the Holga he found around his neck.
"These aren't the Alps, kid," said Zeus.
"Bless your tiny heart, we're sending you home,
"since you've proven to be nothing but a gawker."
And then, without so much as a greeting,
Dagger was gript by the god and flung off the mountain.

14
From the legislative capital of the universe,
Dagger's vision focalized on the strangers truly before him.
Exhausted and struggling to stand,
Dagger watched the gnome stomp around vainly at a scurrying dungbeetle,
as the buxom babe stood idly checking her cuticles.
Our vaunted hero racked his brain for some exit,
as the sweat on his brow glistens like a sword.
"Igitur ridemus," said the gnome, shoving his hands in his vest-pockets.
Might so little depend on our hero that
we can pass over what happens in the next few?
Or does it all end with the tempting dimepiece
presently swilling Bavarian lager from a growler?
As the bard I'm not permitted indifferance
but instead a constant deepening that draws toward.
Like a heeb running to his rabbi with every question,
Dagger thought of his town's wizened furrier,
his beard tucked neatly into his gator.
There is no term for the respect he had for that man.
Formerly a trapper, he was known throughout the land
for chugging his beer without a single glug.
Faithful to every line of the Decalogue,
he never failed to skewer the town's dipshits,
was even fluent in Dvorak,
and had rowed alone to Gloucestershire from the Caymans.
Hard to believe he's not a meme, innit?
'Guh,' thought Dagger. 'Furrier, what now?'

15
Drifting off in thought, Dagger remembered his town's atelier,
and the baal teshuva ballet he'd attended,
then his glazier's most pious glass.
With a grunt he slapped his face and straightened up.
All this had been but an enjambment on his journey.
"Fuck your flim-flam, gnome," spat Dagger,
saying a millisecond prayer to the ghost of his father,
the vicar of his whole ancestral line.
Groping for an exit, Dagger's thoughts
turned towards the Greeks
and the heroically abstract flavor of their philosophy.
Though still gimpy
from his dose
Dagger donned his fez
turned towards the burpy chick
and simply uttered: "Enough." Picking up his walking stick,
Dagger eyed the valley's gradient of clays,
thinking of the enema that awaited him in town.

16
The colors of the valley reminded Dagger of the many dozen dyes
on the yarmulke of his town's sole Jew, Rupert.
Then from the distance came a thunderous bang.
This didn't gel with Dagger, no, not one bit.
What followed sounded like the distinctive clanging of an elfin eulogy,
thought according to dogma to drive the deceased to paradise with irritation.
Picking his way over the archaeological excavation site between them,
Dagger felt like a white Joshua in Canaan,
happy he'd never signed a Hippocratic oath.
Soon he came upon the band fifing up the hill,
studiously avoiding, he noticed, the major fifth.
The preacher appeared to be a megalomaniac, true to type,
and, judging from his sallow complexion, a gamer to boot.
Dagger wedged himself into a crook to spy,
and cautiously eased himself through it to the nearest point.
Amidst this peculiarity Dagger felt like Lot in Gomorrah.
Swiftly he reached for the elixir of invisibility in his hip-satchel,
brewed from a mix of alpine and riverine herbs.

17
As swiftly and majestically as a griffin,
Dagger flew out of the elves' reach,
wishing he could've stopped to flex on 'em.
After seventy-seven nights he became a guest
in that famed city of the mind, capital of the district,
'WTC NYE Party
'With A Well-Hung ENTJ'.
At the gates he was side-eyed by a party of dowagers,
which prompted the stationed fusilier
to lead his examination with this venomous query:
"Ey cumwad, what business have you here?
"Come to treat some raging gonorrhea?
"Or did you simply get misdirected by your GPS?"
With a smirk he looked up Dagger's identification number in the ledger,
[this line has been torn out from the book]
adding, "Drive onwards, stranger, and tell all I paid you my respects."
With nary a gripe back
towards this CYA motherfucker,
Dagger sprang over the dewy lawns by the causeway,
lit by bundles of furze on poles,
then, as he left the periphery, gaslight.

18
I'll edit this next section in light of the very aged among us.
Withdrawing a handful of edamame from his satchel,
Dagger stopped to look at an extremely ugly, hirsute
man vigorously playing the panflute.
"The name of this next song is 'Codified Desire',"
he said, before striking a gong.
Behind him the billboard advertised a datamining firm.
It occurred to Dagger this might be the last Wampanoag,
dolorously dolo as he leaned into the solo.
Moving on, Dagger next passed a grain silo,
where he pissed, to great relief.
His mind was as ever on the Gucci sword.
This sector of the city seemed evacuated.
On the silo a team of schoolchildren had duplicated a Vermeer.
Soon he was underground, tightroping a DSL cable,
feeling gregarious,
with no way to exercise his urges.
Amidst the half-shadows, Dagger felt like he was in the cutscene of an FPS.
Though the tunnel seemed endless,
he soon burst through to the surface in a cloud of dust.
'Excellent,' he thought, before noticing the man splayed before him,
his eyes glinting readily with an offer.
"Got a free orgasm for you if you want it,"
he said, winking through heavy eyeliner.
His face was doughy and red (not from rouge),
and he struck Dagger like a legate fallen on hard times.
Altogether the scene was quite dark.
Dagger immediately geeked, turned, and fled,
shouting, "Win one for the gipper!"

19
His pace was heated and he made it far,
stopping eventually before a painted statue of Aslan,
rearing up to reveal his capacious chest.
In his mouth was lit a single small flame.
Feeling mischievous, Dagger fished it out
to find its fuel was a plastic bottle of grain alcohol.
In the gaming spirit, Dagger put it back and set out to bet
the nearest stranger on what burned. "Ey Ghibelline,"
he said to a pamphleteer, "Quit yer dawa and come 'ere
"(cockmuncher)" he added with his tongue out. "Bet you everything I got
in the pockets of this here Arcteryx that burns likker."
Defiant, the man agreed, leaping (he was short) up to Aslan's mouth
to retrieve the flame. After a few burns, he pulled it out with a gasp.
Defenseless at first, he soon gathered his wits. "Listen bub,
"I'm a filmmaker, which means I could ruin you in a heartbeat."
Neither noticed that in Aslan's olfactory orifices were hidden cameras.
"I'll dub him 'The Ranging Stranger'," said an agent observing.
"His behavior is exhibitive of a joyous but painful need...
"Like Cuchulain he drives onward, through glory, to its darksome wake..."

20
Not long after the two were scrabbling on the cement
until a passing cop exclaimed, "Great! a crime!"
By nature a critic, he offered a few pointers on grapple holds before
the arrest. "You've gotta be like a conjunction..." Then a quick spin
in his cruiser and they arrived at the glittering correctional dome.
The mutant pity-hire receptionist took down their info with her flippers
for what felt like forever as the arresting officer applied the fetters.
"Your bail is one gigabyte," he said.
Dagger tried to mask the blow.
They would be relegated to the computer room...
All the monitors were oxidized red;
indeed, the place hadn't been cleaned in years.
But facts were facts, and Dagger had to deal.
Long gone were the days when he could up and snitch by joining COINTELPRO.
Though the task that lay before him was gigantic,
at least the charge wasn't federal.
Steadying his dejection, Dagger lay his chained hands at the keyboard.

21
With childish self-pity he wished he could evaporate,
as the guard gnoshed on an eclair with rude relish.
The data entry program on screen was confounding,
but Dagger refused to ask for aid. "Ganbare!" he shouted,
and leaned into the task, risking scoliosis.
As he whipped the mouse around the pad it left a trail of gakk.
Many of his fellow prisoners fulminated loudly.
Dagger sighed with resignation as heavy as that of Gilgamesh,
whispering to himself: "Remember, son, what life there is always suffices."
After an hour he received his lunch chit
and scarfed down pickles, hummus, cheetos and brie in the aviary.
Against his misery the chatter of birds felt like a divine indulgence.
In the corridor he rebuffed the hushed solicitations of a Naxalite,
whose rebellion was orthogonal to that Dagger craved.
Personal heroism was his favorite;
there's something effervescent about single combat, the solitary quest...
Alleluia! the man who puts all at risk alone before God!
Lost in thought, Dagger felt ready to divulge his secret purpose,
checked only by the sneering attitude of those around him.
Here in the secret prison he was at risk of frying like a yolk,
cooked through by these snotty Amherst guards' scorn.
At the last second outside his workroom he noticed a cup on a windowsill:
modest, wooden, traced with wild designs and filled to the brim with rheum,
framed with apparent care by two rotting ferns.

22
Though suspicious, Dagger felt this was a prize without equivalence.
Was the milky liquid inside a magic salve?
Or would touching it be to err?
Cautiously, Dagger took it in one hand and felt its surprising heft.
Looking closely, he recognized the dwarvish for 'deer' in the genitive,
a crude singing guppy,
and the name of their most recent führer.
Slowly, as if to open himself to insight, Dagger exhaled,
fiddling with the drawstring on his striped prison-issue pajamas.
Oh, how his girl would've solved this puzzle!
She always interpreted the ancient and foreign with such élan.
To think by now she might've retreated to a nun's hermitage
---or worse, engaged in bigamy.
As his finger ran over a rearing camel
mounted by a veiled babe with cat o' nine tails,
Dagger felt the passing brush of an awesome realization
which seemed to exact supplication from his bent will,
divvying the remainder between his heart and spleen.
Putting the question in abeyance, Dagger stowed the cup in his cubby,
hurrying slightly late to the workroom, arteries pulsing.
"Welcome back, XR-273093; I thought you were deceased."

23
As he sat down the taskmaster sprang a dowel pin into his asshole, snorting.
All afternoon Dagger could've sworn he saw druid script between lines on screen.
How he wished that mysterious cup had merely contained a cold Duvel!
Like a stranded, hungry palmer suddenly enrapt by memories of home,
Dagger tried to forget all the pleasures he'd once known.
Soon the taskmaster had them working double-time.
Whenever he pounded his robotic arm on the lectern he giggled.
Nearing fainting, the screen suddenly appeared to Dagger as a walled garden,
its light a gossamer thread spun by blond pinprick spiders,
tangibly pulling down on his heavy, failing eyelids.
In half-sleep it began to seem to Dagger he might be a dethroned earl,
his duty to break out of this foul prison,
embrace the nearest gang of wastrels
and lead them beyond this city in decline.
Together they would smash the artifacts (starting with the Gucci sword).
As he drifted further off Dagger saw himself on a deep grey gelding...
When he awoke the taskmaster had cut up a gram on his desk,
proffering an ebony straw ridged in curls like a narwhal horn.
"Get powered son!" he shouted. "This day ain't over!!"
Despite rumors the powder was merely ground calyx, Dagger snorted away.
By 5:52 he had eeked out his obligations for the day.
On his way to the door he whistled a little ditty,
as the taskmaster called, "It's a wrap!"
adding in an aside, "You're gifted, son."

24
The art in the halls was all cubist state propaganda. Before returning
to their cells the prisoners had to pass through the stinging cleansing foams.
It occurred to Dagger he lived in the aeon of the jailer, of infinite gaol,
where the only eagles flying bore tracking devices.
The thought lay on him like an attack of gastric distress.
If only he could reach the chalice, perhaps it would be salvific...
"Aww shit," groaned the inmate behind him, "I gits it now,
"Yousa journalist! All undacova and shit!"
The misprison struck Dagger at once as extremely grave.
He half-turned to find with no surprise on the man's uniform printed "GABONITE".
Though he'd surely just been picked up by stormtroopers while crofting,
Dagger's mind ran to the chance he was from a defeated gang.
He could not afford next to make a flip remark.
And then, just like that, at the next bend his interlocutor was gone
---at the very moment Dagger'd worked up his gumption, he told himself.
Soon they were in the cafeteria applying their sanitary gloves.
Over the din of conversation Dagger thought he heard a signifying crow's caw.
It left him too chilled to gab, so he stood and stared
at the young coddled inmates crying silently with hunger
---if not for the rec room's Xbox.
Yes, prison is difficult and all, but Dagger swore
he could tell the gentes of every inmate by his reaction.
Some of them, those with darting eyes, even seemed prodromal.
Most of all Dagger envied those who seemed loyal to each other,
though, uhh... in a way, uhh... he also, like, didn't.
In any case, for dinner that night they were served grass.

25
Yes, the chef was incorrigibly cruel, famous for his deep-fried licorice.
They ate worse than the gauchos of old.
Silently Dagger prayed he might pass through this vale of tears and bile
to a Judah of the heart.
When he opened his eyes he saw a single daisy growing out of the table
roughly plucked by a guard brought in chains from the Maghreb.
Dagger stewed at how small were the cruelties.
If he weren't a coward, he thought, he'd strike the man;
but one must accommodate oneself to one's environs,
lest one end up as a fossil.
Dagger barely stopped to notice the filmic fog that enveloped the cafeteria
as he stuffed his cheeks like a pocket gopher.
All about him man-children cackled at gaffs.
He felt like Bede in the plague, singing the offices almost totally alone.
All the heavies in there were dead, crippled by punitive measures,
or pathetically laying low in the hopes of being exonerated.
What Dagger needed was a zeugma of the spirit, eliding him
beneath the god as great and wide and low and earthen as a henge.
What he faced instead was just, frankly, a massive bummer.
Soon they cleared the meal and it was time for the evening's Dilaudid,
which fizzed when the nurses dropped it in the water glass.
By the color of the liquid Dagger could tell they'd been gipped,
but the outcome was as intended: too stunned to make an assault.
When it kicked in Dagger felt as strange standing as a newt in the desert.

26
Next thing he was under the table, avoiding his fellows' gazes like basilisks,
mistaking the chairs' shadows for ghouls,
hoping against hope the sparkling cast by the rotating chandelier were doves.
"Alai, alai, Divya, my eglantine!" he cried,
as staff filed down the menu they'd engraved hours before.
By the effects Dagger could tell he'd been dosed with a phenethylamine,
perhaps to single out divergents.
The very light seemed to deafen him,
and from his cowering position men appeared as big as ents.
The efficacy of these drugs could not be doubted,
no more than those speculated to have been used at Delphi.
Question was, had they all taken them together, or had he been singled out?
Did the wolf amble alone through this wretched fen?
though of course one is never alone--Elijah is always with us?
The surest answer lay in the records of the provisions committee,
though in such disgrace he would never be allowed an inquiry;
they'd reubuff him with a handful of Prozac for the road.
As he debated his course of action, Gigglypuff floated by.
'Goddamn,' he thought, 'get it together.
'Are you not the man who stopped Kony?
'Surely you've faced outlooks this grim---
'and got by all that time without a lacky.'
Fingering his aurochs-bone pendant,
Dagger clawed his way upright and set to glower at the warden.
"Where do you hail from? or lemme guess---Hyrule?"
But the man would truck no insolence, remarked on Dagger's faggy chin,
and tossed a number of other insults for hero to endure.
Fear not, courage is ageless, and soon
Dagger had retreated to his dank, cavelike cell.

27
In the middle of the night Dagger was struck with a divine afflatus
that had him dashing from bed for a pen. But of course
he had none, and he was famished besides.
He tried to commit it to memory. 'Something to do with dibs,
'on, on, a gull, parti-colored, impaled for the grill...
'All overseen by an ominous grey gundam...'
So it was in Dagger's exile, clutching at dreamt straws
for any clue that might aid him on his sojourn.
To think, he had left a mere ephebe!
Between the loss of inspiration and the decor, Dagger was in low spirits.
Without any proximate models to emulate
he prayed first to Dagon, for a hearty breakfast tomorrow,
then Yahweh, for the bowels with which to shit it.