The Warlock Hits Town

He tries it on with a girl from the office:
“I don’t tell many people, but I’m actually
quite the ventriloquist. Not the nightclub variety,
with the split personality -
one of the originals – old school, baby.

“Call me ‘The Ringmaster’.” Microscale winds
strung to his bandaged fingers, he does the trick,
not ‘throwing’ his voice, but placing it,
as onto a beermat, on a sudden squall
which ferries it down the girl’s blouse,
so her breasts seem to say,
“Hey, it’s cramped down here.”
“Yeah, let us out.”

“I’ve been training the wind for years,” he drawls.
“Not only can I close windows from my armchair –”
he demonstrates with a flourish
“– but I can also do this.”
And the croaking hinges of the pub’s oak door
whistle the theme from A Fistful of Dollars.

A bloke mutters, “Wanker” under his breath,
and our hero has it out from under him
like a tablecloth, leaving the crockery of his teeth
only lightly jarred.

‘Wanker’ resounds in everyone’s ears
and a dozen chairs are scraped, heads pivoted
to pinpoint the outburst’s source.
The bloke becomes incarnadined.

Later, more success: “So the wind is, like, your bitch?”
says a chick in pinstripes. “More like
a shape-changing giant octopus,” he slurs,
“tapping directly into my thoughts,
one of its suction cups latched to me
like a stethoscope, f’ya see what I mean.”

Some clock his moonish complexion,
the dark calligraphy of his features,
his aristocratic wrists
and whisper, “Vampire.”

Netting the word,
he disagrees – “Dragon!” – and jokes
that the yards of bubblewrap caught in branches
alongside the A306
are his sloughed skin

He loses his wallet somewhere in Soho,
frisks stranger after stranger, slavishly,
makes scarves into swinging cobras
as he and his octopus agent stalk through clothes
like beaters,
sending train tickets, receipts shooting up
like ash

Getting home, he pukes near a bus shelter
and cuts all his hair off with a knife of wind