Collected Poems 1931-74 (23 page)

(
pyknics
are
short,
fat
and
hairy,

leptosomes
thin
and
tall
)

The schizophrene, the cyclothyme

Swerve from the droll to the sublime,

Coming of epileptoid stock

They tell the time without a clock.

The pyknic is the prince of these

And glorifies his mental status

Not by his acts on mind's trapeze

But purely by divine afflatus.

Oblivious to the critic's canon

The rational booby's false décor

He swigs away the Absolute

And then demands some more.

Pity the lanky leptosome

Myoptic tenebrous and glum

Whose little pigs must stay at home

Unless they move by rule of thumb.

Salute the podgling pyknic then

That gross and glabrous prince of men,

Contriver of the poet's code

And hero of the Comic Mode.

And Lord, condemn the leptosome

To Golgotha his natural home

The pyknic who's half saint half brute

O waft him on Thy parachute,

And may his footsteps ever roam

Where alcohol is Absolute.

1960/
1960

From Travancore to Tripoli

I trailed the great Imago,

Wherever Freud has followed me

I felt Mama and Pa go.

(The engine loves the driver

And the driver loves his mate,

The mattress strokes the pillow

And the pencil pokes the slate)

I tried to strangle it one day

While sitting in the Lido

But it got up and tickled me

And now I'm all Libido.

My friends spoke to the Censor

And the censor warned the Id

But though they tried to hush things up

They neither of them did.

(The barman loves his potion

And the admiral his barge,

The frogman loves the ocean

And the soldier his discharge.)

(The critic loves urbanity

The plumber loves his tool.

The preacher all humanity

The poet loves the fool.)

If seven psychoanalysts

On seven different days

Condemned my coloured garters

Or my neo-Grecian stays,

I'd catch a magic constable

And lock him behind bars

To be a warning to all men

Who have mamas and pas.

1960/
1960

Not from some silent sea she rose

In her great valve of nacre

But from such a one—O sea

Scourged with iron cables! O sea,

Boiling with salt froths to curds,

Carded like wool on the moon's spindles,

Time-scarred, bitter, simmering prophet.

On some such night of storm and labour

Was hoisted trembling into our history—

Wide with panic the great eyes staring …

Of man's own wish this speaking loveliness,

On man's own wish this deathless petrifact.

1964/
1961

With dusk rides up the god-elated night,

Perfume of goatskin and footsore stone

Where plants expire in chaff and husk

On marble threshing-floors of bone.

Here in the gallery where the initiates strained

To lick the sacred ribbon from the soil,

Still wet from the libation's stains of

Honey, grain and this year's olive-oil.

Well: to sit down, to anonymise a bit

By some unleavened altar which preserves

An echo of truth for the precocious will,

Of some disinherited science of the nerves.

‘How long will the full Unlearning take?

How long the unacting and unthinking run?

When does the obelisk the sleeper wake

Repaired and newly minted like a sun?'

‘The issues change, alas the problems never.

The capital question cuts to the very bone.

Drink here your draught of the eternal fever,

Sit down unthinking on the Unwishing stone.'

1966/
1961

Some diplomatic mission—no such thing as ‘fate'—

Brought her to the city that ripening spring.

She was much pointed out—a Lady-in-Waiting—

To some Persian noble; well, and here she was

Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.

By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,

By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.

He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,

The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:

The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;

How would one say ‘to enflame' in her tongue,

He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?

When their eyes met he felt dis-figured

It would have been simple—three paces apart!

Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go,

The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes

Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.

Next day he deliberately left the musical city

To join a boring water-party on the lake.

Telling himself ‘Say what you like about it,

I have been spared very much in this business.'

He meant, I think, that never should he now

Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow

Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,

The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,

Grey temple, long slide into fat.

On the other hand neither would she build him sons

Or be a subject for verses—the famished in-bred poetry

Which was the fashion of his time and ours.

She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact

Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins

In a biography the year of birth and death.

1964/
1961

          Take me back where sex is furtive

          And the midnight copper roams;

          Where instead of comfy brothels

          We have Lady Maud's At Homes.

          Pass me up that White Man's Burden

          Fardels of Democracy;

          Three faint cheers for early closing,

          Hip-Hip-Hip Hypocrisy!

          Sweet Philistia of my childhood

          Where our valiant churchmen pant:

          ‘Highest standard of unliving,

          Longest five-day week of Cant.'

          Avert A.I.! Shun Vivisection!

          Join the RSPCA,

          Lead an anti-litter faction!

          Leave your leavings in a tray!

          Cable grandma I'll be ready,

          Waiting on the bloody dock;

          With a hansom for my luggage—

          Will the French release my cock?

          Take me back in An Appliance,

          For I doubt if I can walk;

          Back to art dressed in a jockstrap,

          Back to a Third Programme Talk.

          Roll me back down Piccadilly

          Where our National Emblem stands,

          Watching coppers copping tartlets,

          Eros! wring thy ringless hands!

          Ineffectual intellectual

          Chewing of the Labour rag,

          Take me back where every Cause

          Is round the corner, in the bag.

          Buy me then my steamer ticket

          For the land for which I burn …

          Yet, on second thoughts, best make it

          The usual weekday cheap return!

          1980/
1962

Livin' in a functional greenhouse

In tastefully painted tones,

Squattin' on chairs of tubular steel

And dicin' with the baby's bones.

    Chorus: He was her man, etc.

Goldfish swimming in a circle,

Swimming round and round like thoughts,

While a frigidaire keeps the bottle cold

And the drinks in their glass retorts.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

Help us to bear all our follies

In a forest of sanitary bricks,

Where no bed-bug lives in the closet

And no death-watch beetle ticks.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

With faces blanker than porcelain

In a forest of termite steel

Where the saxophones keep repeating

‘The People shall not feel.'

    Chorus:
Ibid.

Where the psyche fades like a violet

Overlooked in a dry box-wall;

We're rehearsing the Second Coming

Unaware of the Second Fall.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

Riffle a book in the library,

Yawn at the clocks in the sky,

Rove the city streets with a briefcase,

Feeling your life go by.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

Once the saints were good box-office

And the times seemed full of sap,

But things haven't been right since Eden.

Come here and sit in my lap.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

It's the end of a city culture

And an end of the age of Sex,

Soon we'll multiply by fission

By courtesy of World Shell-Mex.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

A kiss to the deathless Helen

An embrace to the Prodigal Son,

For the nerves are dying in their bodies

Horribly, one by one.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

The taste buds die like mushrooms

And the sex buds die like spore

And this ain't no time to wake them

Cause there ain't no Time no more.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

There ain't no
n
-dimensions

To make a place for love

And there ain't no Space to fit it in

Below or up above.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

Frankie and Johnny were lovers

But the Lord waxed mighty wroth

When he saw them trying to die together,

A-knitting their own winding-cloth.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

For their race was the race of Adam,

Their mother was the golden Eve,

But they died in the XXth Century

Leaving nothing to believe.

    Chorus:
Ibid.

1980/
1962
 

Her dust has pawned kings of gold,

Bodies the winter entered and tubed

In cerements of damp their fallen stars,

Invader of the minds their lichen covered,

And between the stones moss,

And between the bones fingernails and hair.

Only the objects of their past estate remain,

Dispersing now like limbs in different museums.

The crowns and trumpets tarnish easily,

The tangles of ribbon rot like heads of hair

In cupboards where they kept the holy chrism.

Only the eye in an ikon here or there

Amends and ponders and reflects neglects:

Dead monarchs toughened to a stare.

1966/
1963

And dost thou then, Roderick, once more raising

In Blackfriars that traditionally O but so lukewarm

Eyebrow, which doubtless thou spellest highbrow, chide me,

And from the frugal and funless fund of thy native repository

Of culture, lay thyself once more open, O literary mooncalf,

To a creative's friendly but well-aimed suppository?

Nay, Rod, who from thy bleak and apricot anonymity

Dost in prose bald and breathless exhale an ineffable

Condescension, spattering on poor art thy spinsterish appraisals

Surely thy muse misleads thee, or lies under some shadow cursed,

Forever to gnaw, nibble, gnash termite-wise at thy betters,

With thy English Eyebrow lukewarm, thy lips and sphincters pursed?

Has she not told thee, fog-bound Thames-bedevilled fabulator

That the rewards of laziness will be a conferred mereness, a dark

Sterility, the pedant's parasitic portion? That somehow thou

Must struggle to snap the gyve and unequivocally quit

The cold steamed cod of thy monochrome prosing or else

Be dubbed forever a
pince-fesse
of English Lit.?

1968/
1963