‘What kind of wolf are you?’
                                              ‘I wish a were.’

‘Are you speaking grit,’ the gyring gorgon asked,
‘or subjugating us to the subjunctive?’

‘A were-wolf!’ whined the wolf whelp warily watching
the gyring gorgon’s garter-snake coiffure.
‘Why aren’t you venomous? Why am I not stone?’

‘Because we’re euro versions of old Europe,
defanged from funnelling finance to the Greeks,’
she fumed. She furrowed fang-scarred brow. She sat.

The whelp drew courage from that, and drew near.
It drew a Druid symbol in the sand.
It asked, ‘If we revert can I be dire?’

The gorgon hesitated, hissed green hairspray
at a spit-curl serpent forelock going astray.

She sighed, ‘Frankly, we must all now hang together.’
‘Surely Franklin,’ nit-picked pedantically the wolf.
‘Assuredly, we all hang separately
on every common interest we debate.’

Each regards the other, seeing nothing
they have in common, saving comedies
of errors, and they exit. Curtains. War.