Hungry, and missing sex,
the Magician ripens pears in a bowl
he keeps beside his futon.

When he wakes in the thicket of night,
sheets gripping him like a silk handkerchief
from which he’s to be vanished,

he uncurls to take one in a fist,
suckers himself to its hips
and lets its body burst into him

till he too is ruined to a dangling core,
spindle for a scroll of tatty flesh,
his best all bitten away,

and within him: a tiny, lute-shaped hole
where the tight seed rattles.