The Hydra

I am a many-toothed thing
a single smile could fill the cupped palms of twenty thousand til
they overflowed with the polished ivory of a heathen's mouth
the powder of snow my dismembered grin,
my shattered cavern of lies,
my falling blizzard of poppy seed teeth
I could laugh a thousand times with just one muscled tongue
and I have many

I have many faces and many eyes
and a hundred more masquerade visages so I may pucker my lips at strangers
and snarl at lovers
So that my cheeks may become sweet pomegranates from dancing, and
blowing kisses to the ocean and the damp, arthritic roots beneath the mountains
And if my corset is laced to my bones my displeasure is caged
inside a jester's paper mache face

My painted lips, my powdered eyes
my opium breath, the gifted orator
cage the same hummingbird
the restless, singular heart

The face of the harlot, the atheist
is cut clean from its trunk
The artist and the libertine smoke tobacco
with expressions of the most mild concern

I am headless, for just a moment
before I rise from dust
and see with all my new eyes