Bedouin of the London Evening Read online

  O She who would paper her lamp with my wings!

  That hour when all the Earth is drinking the

  Blue drop of thunder; and in

  Dark debris as of a magician’s room, my beast

  A scented breathing

  To the East.

  20th Century Invalid

  I am sick mortar and anonymous

  Like that night worker

  Who must wreck his health

  By eating fog in cities

  Laid up very still in breath.

  But do not blame my illness

  On the grave that digs itself

  From ‘one day’ to my shoe

  And nudges to be stuffed.

  The fault lies with the tutor

  Who gave too powerful an instruction

  In Creation, that I am stricken

  And anonymous on city nights,

  Who had no right to show me Earth

  Abroad in Limbo with her clouds

  That browse about her in bright fleets,

  Or deeply with his thumbprint mark

  The softly-beating mortar of my heart.

  He knew that his tuition

  In so powerful a Creation

  That roosts abroad in Ether

  Thickly hung with blazing fleece,

  Would groom me for damnation

  In the city among men

  For to bite the dust anonymous

  At night is twice as bitter

  When the appetite is great.

  Diary of a Rebel

  For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness

  I need the café – where old mats

  Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves

  That are brilliant with the nap of idleness

  …And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!

  On the window is the milk of lazy breath,

  And the coalcart rumbles – with huge purses

  Full of dust and narcotics for the masses!

  Sin pricks me like a convict’s suit of arrows

  For here my evil, blue, and moody youth

  Has found its old lair…at the bottom

  Of the soil path in the bed of stinging nettles

  That are splashed with wood milk

  And have every hair upon them raised to strike!

  There is no trade can lure me out with bundle,

  Noose, and feeding-bag; I know that fate

  Has graves to fill in daily life,

  And the jargon of the meat-fly’s leaded wing

  To put to sleep the citizen

  Employed in keeping worms at bay by breathing.

  Bedroom in an Old City

  In the room with the water mark as rich as sago on the wall, the young head of a minx asleep sheds on cheap linen the pale silk hair of baby Kensington.

  An apricot fabric, hanging in wads lightly grimed, admits morning. The furnishings have picked themselves clothing as country bushes with hooks are able to dress from passing children. A tumbler of green beach glass with some spillings, bright water ovals firm on dust, is the bedside comfort.

  Against hair and sheet the mesmerised face is very slightly active. Paint burns from yesterday’s gouache are healing on the mouth; it passes some great supernatural illness with the zither of a little healthy breath. The shorthand typist at seventeen: on either side of warm nostril she presses crossly to her cheek the stiff gilt lashes of a court page.

  In the underframe of the window, beading records a lorry from the world; buzz of a giant ’cello string. A chest of drawers take the itch of the infection.

  Streets have begun.

  A lapel dog with goblet eyes of hot seccotine stamps on brass toes to where a black tree eats gravel; the snout at the urinal shiny as the chinpad of a violin. Labourers, their ringlets scented with blue grease, assemble at some work of coloured mud. A tradesman with the specific violence and well-being of butchers steps out for his attractive marble shop of quartered bodies; glazed cheeks of the very best meat, these have been costly feeders since he was a young soldier handsome as a tulip and badly finished at the hands.

  In the distance, weather can be seen thrusting and gleaming. A diamond cutter has been over the metropolis. The atmosphere has spat once or twice on fish and magazines.

  A sharp piece of blond sugar rattles in the mouth of a newsboy; he lubricates and passes with a humid bag of language. Infant snob, he adjusts precociously his printed jargon sheets to door and nameplate. With its ingenious crimes, the civilisation is comprehensive; it is not necessary to take the rest of the world seriously. But in order that they may be said to think deeply, people go to the trouble of believing their opinions even when they are alone.

  And when she wakes, this London minx of seventeen, the whole city, the whole Imperial rubbish heap of wastrels, scullions, houris, fauns, and bedouin, will look to this pillow where a life so young, secret, and clean opens its eyes that it puts Mortality in doubt – for possibly forty seconds.

  The Flâneur and the Apocalypse

  For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe

  With its great streets full of air and shade,

  Its students and cocottes,

  And traffic, roughly caked with blood,

  Is not enough. The whole of Europe put to sleep

  By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,

  And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,

  And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,

  Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.

  A Europe…motionless with dust and night,

  As if a squid her bag had emptied,

  As if a doormat had been shaken over it,

  Is not mysterious enough for his infatuated tread!

  The Furies are modern, they don’t drive you they entice

  With cafés, lovers, dusty streets…with the Apocalypse

  ‘Not this one – but the next,’ they hiss.

  Fear’s Blindworm

  Fear is the blindworm in the brain,

  In souls that keep house with a dagger

  And love the cabbage-shade,

  Hell’s brainworm gnaws the harder.

  When God unpurses all the grudges

  Of the Universe on lives propped up on crutches

  Like a pier – seas rock to music

  For years, before they break it into matches,

  And all the roughly-handled blue lumber

  Of the storm licks lightning and barks blood

  At lives on their rough crutches made of timber,

  And the soul is larder to Hell’s worm of mud,

  Then in the cabbage-cold underground of brains

  Afraid of life, Eternity already has begun

  When the worm turns Creation into dust

  And the World crawls away from under them.

  But pinched in the thighs of low duties,

  Subject to forces that make Asia drag her anchor,

  Souls that are great are in their element

  Despite the feasting canker.

  The Solitary’s Bedroom

  Now for the night, liquid or bristling!

  When owls make the ink squeak at my window

  And my bedroom that can bone my body of its will,

  Drinks out my brains on pillows.

  Like a bather caught and skinned by rollers

  I shall toss for an eternity in surf,

  When the air-eating spirit in my nostrils

  Is maddened by its heavy coat of earth!

  Now for your rest, eyes where my passions lay

  Waterlogged in flashing muscles all day

  Well below the waterline and plotted in their acids,

  Salt mortice sets your lids.

  Baked on Hell’s rubbish heap I go on smouldering

  With my spirit at its bread of breath

  Incapable of beating out the flames! And hatches

  Are raised cautiously by all the senses…

  O once you have taken this draught of black air

  You would be
glad of infinity to get your bearings!

  Rainfield and Argument

  Pass on – to the next child, tranquil rainfield,

  For this is the anthem

  Of oblivion’s white oxygen and bird warbling

  In the abandoned rainfield

  They sing who are disinherited.

  And should the privileged fierce child deny

  That all his rainfield hours

  Belong to the Lord of oxygen and watershowers

  And birds in deep rain resident,

  Flutes of the clear firmament,

  Then let him be dumbfounded by it as a lie;

  Rainfields up to the knees

  And hours that are ample and shimmering as seas

  Are breath-taking and worthy

  To be the work of Majesty.

  And let him drown-bathe in the water firmament

  That on webs rings a carillon

  And birds that dress the breeze with wings, and own

  They argue for the Lord of time

  And white and icy oxygen.

  Gutter Lord

  I knew the poet’s rag-soft eyelid was the gutter’s fee

  For the way down to life. I had

  My lodgings in that quarter of the city

  Like a cat’s ear full of cankered passages

  Where November wraps the loiterer as spiders do their joints.

  I was apprenticed to the moth bred from my clothes –

  Gold sail, folded up! for with

  Her tread, as Prince of footpads I could take

  My own grave unawares; or when my head was baked

  With Jewish magic – stalk the Archangel, Thy insect, He

  Whose nest is thatched to ride the juice and fire of storms!

  I was no merchant who for passport

  Strokes a pearl. Only those who trade

  Their rag-lid of bright lashes may business

  In the Supernatural with the gutter for address.

  My gutter – how you gleamed! Like dungeon floors which

  Cobras have lubricated

  Your time was kept in slimy yawns while you

  Prized up the warm roof of the poor man’s shoe

  And lacquered it with mire, that the grave might find

  A way in to its meat – meanwhile the fool re-adored

  His face green as a toad

  Seen in a rippling crack of rain.

  The grave: whose grunt lifts the latch, whose

  Leavings found at night upon my flank were as black bread

  And smoked like Satan’s droppings. O Heaven was greedy

  At my nostril dark as a violet

  To draw out her own breath from my brute

  Freeze it with winter while I slept, and

  With it bolt me to the ground in linen and diamond!

  Poet and Iceberg

  No powerful and gloomy city,

  Which has rid itself of vermin,

  Will admit to keeping

  One of these disreputable pets

  With amorous limbs of milk

  Fond of nocturnal strolls

  And the immortal dirt of London

  Under the clear panes of its nails.

  Except the rogue is hunted off the street

  And hissed, cities lie undefended

  And weak from centuries of boredom

  At the mercy of the pest

  Who lives by thieving like all vermin

  And will take a heart out of its chest

  By force, and handle it

  So gently that it’s broken.

  For brooding and embittered cities

  Only slowly form their prejudice

  Into an iceberg that is large enough

  For ignorance to steer

  From the bottom of a soul

  By its rudder made of glass

  Until the diamond smells blood and gores

  The poet in the ribs in self-defence.

  Oath

  I swear that I would not go back

  To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies

  That built the Earth – there, under the heavy trees

  With their bark that’s full of grocer’s spice,

  Not for an hour – although my heart

  Moves, thirstily, to drink the thought – would I

  Go back to run my boat

  On the brown rain that made it slippery,

  I would not for a youth

  Return to ignorance, and be the wildfowl

  Thrown about by the dark water seasons

  With an ink-storm of dark moods against my soul,

  And no firm ground inside my breast,

  Only the breath of God that stirs

  Scent-kitchens of refreshing trees,

  And the shabby green cartilage of play upon my knees.

  With no hard earth inside my breast

  To hold a Universe made out of breath,

  Slippery as fish with their wet mortar made of mirrors

  I laid a grip of glass upon my youth.

  And not for the waterpools would I go back

  To a Universe unreal as breath – although I use

  The great muscle of my heart

  To thirst like a drunkard for the scent-storm of the trees.

  Ace of Hooligans

  Society on the globe. At first in here:

  The sweet sour larder with its shelf of muslin bonnets

  Fragile as kites, the Ace of Hooligans

  Broke in his mouth to mutiny, a drink

  Delicious as rain. While under his lashes of corn

  The dream in fluent opal swam against his eyes

  Its waters sumptuously baited as the sea

  With chiffon nettles. O his gosling panes!

  His zoo of sighs hot as a madman’s breath,

  Among blue smarting herbs and blue bee fur of rotten bread.

  Outside: there was the ditch, the ideal boredom

  In the brilliant thousands of a dose of thunderdrops;

  The grass, smashed by the sky, which stews and tugs itself

  On the muscular caramels of fast mud.

  He, kneeling, with the moonlit sight of thieves,

  Begged the ounce hog of the hedges she would seed

  A touchy litter of her vermin commoners

  That, gentle, he find syrup in his torn black mouth

  Before the radiant traffic of space

  Cut to pieces the palm of his hand.

  Meadow giants, with hooks screwed to their bodies built of grass,

  Their muzzles giving verbals of hot milk

  Their ankles in the suck floor to a mucus climate,

  These! When he raved for the globe’s gilt side,

  Sun forests’ brute of fur, its blond swag head

  Gorged at the warm beef of an earth hole, the red young stowed

  Not twenty inches from the stupid boil of its nose.

  The blue Male of the Equator, nude trunk

  In war lacquers, throat groomed for hysteria.

  While for divinity: the bronze Him roots out the white It.

  Still a cipher, with a name sewn to his clothes,

  Sexless as trout or chestnut eaten when the flesh is green,

  He crossed the salt stare of the chart, its groping margins;

  Land, clothed in steam, whose sea lisps to its pod of monsters;

  Those plains where heaven thrums the blades grilled light as foil,

  And tows the stallion, flash neck and nude-lipped head,

  On burnt white hair. Whole skies shantung and music

  In the tree drunk with his weather! the foreigner,

  His merchandise rahat lacoum in fragrant drums

  To trade the Irish who speak water on the syllable.

  Beasts lit their eyes; the planet took in moth and dog.

  Across the rubbishy beloved continent

  Was drawn the circus with its tinsel hutch of midgets;

  Fluorescent tournaments of ladylike brown animals,

  He smelt
man’s acid in their tame wool coats.

  Hair as bright as butter scorched his boyhood chin,

  A vein painted and roped against his thigh,

  And his mouth felt her tongue. Returning home

  His dazzled body hunted Africa

  The red yes at the top of six flights of stairs.

  The blind rubbers of the mouth of love!

  The awakening with citron stare!

  Morning: in a sty of tinted women.

  She, on a quilt, bit roses; mammal pink.

  He, a witch scab on his dream, left for infinity

  While his soul peered out of his navel, hideous.

  Streets: uttering bull smoke. Under a wall

  Slum vegetable, its meat leg feeding.

  His arrogance, these nerves which focus ecstasy –

  Accelerations of the bankrupt mud.

  The light; sashes and lustres. The crammed and rustling ball.

  A dog rinsing its jaws in the sweet juice of a lake.

  O thigh purring against raiment! O treacherous

  No man’s land.

  Rome

  It’s the café and the boredom, in the semi-dark

  People have a certain rank elegance

  And the dirt-encrusted street with its great jar of water

  Keeps my blood too fresh and truculent for work.

  All these Roman fops going by, the shuffling,

  The dripping waterjar and the dark café

  …built for stealing people…

  And the walls are full of musk, it’s baked into them.

  The temptation to live! Even a bad conversation…

  In a street that’s built for boredom