Self-Portrait: The Bastard on a Burning Deck

Rapier-cute.

Button-keen.

Laden with peanut butter and jam,
The salad fork illuminates
The pearly teeth of Our Subject,
The thin lips and deepset eyes set in a rictus of nearly Papal cruelty.

Haughty as a Spanish Don
An even better dresser,
Riches even shameful on
A crooked tax assessor

Fee, fi, fo, fum,
For once the blood of Englishmen
Curdles away like the queen of the May
At his Janus-faced approach.

Who among us, pray, enacts a Walking Palindrome?

A man, a plan, a canal, a couple of bucks for a trusted old pal, a pillowcase stuffed with gravel, a calling card: Have Horse, Will Travel, a saw, a paw, a claw, a mute and blinded black jackdaw, a monkey wrench, Dame Judy Dench, a cobbler's bench, a vaguely louche and morbid stench, a man, a plan, a canal, a man, a canal, a man, a plan, a man, a canal, a plan, a completely different man, a barrelhoop, a phlegmy cough, a stone, a bone, a clone, a groan, something muttered on the phone, a bike, a spike, a pike, a dike, the end of another Thousand-Year Reich, a log, a bog, a long hard slog, a tough-acting enzyme to loosen that clog:

Panama!