The Cloaked Man

The flat-faced man by the fire

The dirty girl's hands in her sleeves

A sailor, a traveller, a seller of crosses 

A bitch and a crooner, three stockbrokers, thieves.

All drink and carousing, their hearts and desires

All richly unwinding, all glinting in smiles

The warm light of laughter, the thrum and the roar

The wind wheedling under the thousand-year door 

 A pistol wrapped tightly lurks under a cloak, festooning a man in the corner whose smoke

Stubs needles to his knuckles and guttering, broke

The spell in his minds eye, no longer.

Disturbance, a slip-shift, a cantilever snakes

Through the mood of the place as the patrons, half-baked 

Sense motive or meaning which prior unseen, wheens the 

Tone of their evening and their slow crunches home

Remembered in instant, quick muzzle flash frame

The gun rears up, hurls the end in a flame

At the man with the flat face

Who falls in his hearth-place

And cradled by dirty girls' hands 

Slips away from the sailors, the brokers, the thieves

And on to the lands where nobody breathes

The cloaked man smokes on, and leaves