"Neither Breton nor French but from
Saint Malmo am I"

a Corsair cabin boy and captain racing
the Clarisse, fleeing the Sybille with a Lettre

de Marque and Reprisal from the Councils
of Ancients and Five Hundred I, the ship's

Master - who ditched eight guns aft
and out ran a frigate - stowed safe

on-board the Auspicious, seized with a full
merchantman and brig the hero and dealer

King Privateer, sailed into a famished Port Louis.
Millions of francs in cargo seized I, baronial

Robert the Napolean Colonel Surcouf, mortally
ruthless and physically minded, who floated

a bygone age pre and post Bonaparte First
Consul, after


"the prompt, severe, inflexible justice"


of The Terror had passed and two first among
equals in infamy and visciousness

Robespierre and Cromwell - their grievous gods
bare boned, Incorruptible and Ironside snarled
in history
slaughtered citizens comporting themselves


"enemies of liberty,"


who controlled all sou and shilling.

~


"Le citoyen non slave pour la république
suis moi"


proclaimed war-deities slaying with scottish
maidens, guillotines and grief trees


"who by their conduct, associations
comments, or writings
have shown themselves partisans
of tyranny"


and upheld order by beheading, pledging
my allegiance to Odin on his throne

of eternal thunder and light in a disordered age
of Convention and Commonwealth cause that lit

Anglo-Saxon Woden in fire-storm and ice-gale
blowing below the all-air deity, next to a fertility

god of human pleasure and peace, Freyr
the phallus his Answerer sheathed, Valkyries'

armour-sparks an Aurora Borealis, fused
through trade-routes from Carlisle

to Alexandria, drawn to tutelars of cultural
darkness and one expanding market

whose ancient coinage of flesh a runaway
blast of inflation collapsed by poetic fury

of hypoborean wind-gods and warriors
hunting an eidolon force my daemon's shade

wove in the poison-roof of serpent-spine
dripping wet venom on caitiffs wading

a river in blood beneath knife-floes tearing
past North facing doors, it's kerf-frozen slag

riming where the serf-ghost swung
in a gibbet-cage and furnaced the spirit

of suffrage for millennia, in a fiendish cant
creole and cryptolect on Law and Moot

Mount, heard at the peak of hostage mounds
where rival familial members got maimed

and princely material from the roydamma
derbfine blinded-out of contention

by unblemished kings who snatched thralls
from Hiberno-Albion slayers and wrote

"England is too pure an air for a slave
to breathe."