His broad back
I follow, transfixed.
Staring at the deep black holes
that pock his crisscrossed neck,
mine deep and ancient.
I walk with a mouth too, too full of saliva,
and a desire to reach and squeeze,
a desire that is almost overwhelming,
a desire I hold to my chest.
We trudge across the rutted field,
dun brown and filled with seed,
the horizon lies long in front of us,
low strips of field,
coloured paint brush horizontal,
awash with crow black crows
that rise in lazy alarm at our
Napoleonic advance.

In the distance, the old White House rests,
at the edge of infinity,
on the edge of the cliff,
a cliff that is slowly crumbling,
crumbling into the chattering sea below.
Inside lies waiting,
past empty, moat filled rooms,
through time dulled hallways that sparkle,
up broad creaking stairs
clothed in faded, once dazzling, carpet,
the Empress Dowager,
who sits,
her shattered, Emerald throne beneath her.
Enveloped in leaves of mulberry,
ennobled in clouds of white.
Paper-like, quiescent moths,
fill the room with stagnant shadows,
linen wings whispering secrets
to the empty husk that sits alone
on the broken chair,
whose vacant eyes blaze
with a pitiless, pointless, power.

My mute companion,
Suited and booted,
maintains a steady pace,
though our feet weigh too, too heavy,
as they gather the loamy soil about them
like some sort of penance
for sins we are yet to enjoy.
His face stays turned away from me
His broad back towards,
and the white house that is our destination,
seems a fixed point on the horizon
that will always remain unreachable. 
Goblin flies harry us like Cossacks,
as we stumble wearily forward.
Perhaps this is in fact,
less a triumphant advance,
and more a Napoleonic retreat.