Casinos from Kowloon to Baden-Baden

Serve our breakfast on a silver griddle –

We who prop by night the gaming table

Not for gain but regain of our loss –

Cut and run if that is your good fortune

While no regret of wasted hand or mind

Detains you in a dawn’s ‘if only’ land

Nor midnight’s acrid haunted rumination

Eliot spoke to every poet’s gambit –

‘You may have wasted all your life for nothing’ –

The King of Hearts protruded from his sleeve –

We’d mark his card but all the cards are marked

From pain and pleasure lacking common measure

Fortune hurls our dice to untold ends –

Our limit she transfers to newer fools

For play and risk must animate the world

Pick a card – the cryptic door

Sought by calculation spins ajar

Offering what passes here for heaven –

A glamour cold as mirror clothed in lost repose

The world awaits your personal kabala

Assured no stark injustice may it change –

Perhaps a ghost eludes your every system

Like love that leaves no track nor stakes its claim