DEAR LEADER ❋ Damian Rogers

I was too timid to be Slime Queen, the beauty who communed
with the soft bubbling scum on someone’s lake after lunching
on lysergic acid with a gang of pranksters. The age of gilded
gurus continues on under corporate sponsorship, and still
the comfortable suffer in their well-cut pantsuits. Cruel California
calls out for fresh recruits; killer converts map the continent’s
most generative conference centres. Please accept this pamphlet
illustrated with mail-order aura enlargers. Are you illuminated?
At the bottom of the Pacific, microscopic monsters chase every
bioluminescent organism twinkling in the brink. In my youth,
I too was a magnet, and I did not dim for decades. Set adrift,
I learned to shuck my shell, oozing out into the Waters of Truth.
My head shall not be taken from me, my head shall not be taken.