Bonny Cassidy

Sick in the head

The nineteenth century clicks
round the square, a spring-loaded pigeon.
Stone on cloudy stone ripples

beneath his boots
through the strasse hordes—
defaced men beware

his cherried shield
not quite crimson, deeply orange
it talks

to them in their own language, it walks
like Werther, their rosy-fingered neighbour

but it’s Fanta-Face, they whisper
here it comes
he
the

—Amerika—

comes now
asking for coffee
the women staining themselves with black bread, hello—

here come
his women in men, his men in magenta