SNAKE
Snake
knew he
had been duped
for what was, is,
Lucifer but
the template and
prototype
for your
common as muck
standard garden variety
cheating, lying politician
now, as then,
we desperately love
and cannot get enough of
so he
turned as he was
leaving, before
finally squiggling away
addressed
the fallen pair
even as their
joy was
set to
morph
into devastation
telling them
hope would remain
as long
as they swore
upon their now very
mortal lives to
never
get the poetry
wrong
which
if we had the capacity
to understand, were
on same deep
intellectual
level
might have
softened the nightmare
forever
right there
and then.
poems 2 die for 
Damien, this is a stunner. The way you wield that slithering, staggered lineation — the physical typography becoming the snake’s movement as he “squiggles away” — is pure craft.
But the real brilliance is the pivot. Taking the oldest deception in the book and reframing it not as a moral failure, but as an aesthetic one is deeply, wickedly clever. You’ve made the Serpent a patron saint of lost causes, whispering that the only true sin is getting the poetry wrong. In a world drowning in the “common as muck” political lies you so perfectly skewer, that final plea feels less like a curse and more like the only salvation we have left—a desperate, beautiful demand that we pay closer attention to the shape and truth of our words.
It’s bleak, it’s witty, and it cuts to the bone. Absolutely magnificent work.
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