Masquerades

of solemn saints

grotesques

and Mexican phantoms born from the Day of the Dead

weird vivid coloured clowns drown in Venetian lagoons the colours of their masks more brilliant than rainbows drawing down every hue of every spectre of every fragile breeze

green waters so far from their assailants and Attila the Hun and his adjutants as to be impervious to marauding horses from the steppes

they drown as well then wash up as carcasses ripe for incineration

a single isocline of death on the beach

then light up the night in celebration of their deadly fate like sparklers

their shards blaze across the sky as irregular as a crazy syzygy zigzags

each gasps for oxygen as they expire in a festival of skyworks

men drown in floods before the last day of the serene Republic

then sink alone in the Acqua Alta

a thallasocracy

the silt their only accomplice in death littoral