SELF PORTRAIT AS CLONE OF JEANNE D’ARC

Edward McLaren

After Bunny Rogers

She talks with the voice of an actress caught in outlines.
Snub-nosed, inoculated in the melting zoo
of DeviantArt against flesh, I give up.
Vaccines ejecting thirst drain abstract romance.

It's sad, really. The first time I had to live was on a pyre,
the second satirical drawings, and now: blood.
The colourist girls highlighting my foramen
contract my look to a visigothic shovel.

You can call me John. Jeanne was someone else
with dark hair. A flower of past deaths.
My anamnesis sketches a hieroglyph smirk
while Nicholas Cruz listens to Salad Days

entering his school. That title comes from Shakespeare's Cleopatra's
sigh on youth: "When I was green in judgment, cold in blood."
Jeanne hears this being said as Christ puppets
ventricles of kids to sacred hearts.

We look as faint as Pre-Raphaelite women.
And now in the cerebrum of this artist
the deification of arms plays my tape: “I was born in England.
Yet Avalon. . .its characters. . .are my face.”