Percussion
Cymbals
Arrows glitter through the air,
Wherewith, we, plumed of dappled rainbows,
Ravage quiet.
Shrilly shimmering, we whizz, hiss,
Thrash our eruptions volcanic,
Clattering into scythes
Which pierce the lead-of-air.
Our arrogant syncopations become
Bright sunflowers of steel waxing gigantical,
Then, more animated, clash; there....
Have two suns collided?
And tell me has the curtain been pulled down?
Drum
Men go to be murdered like innocent lambs
At the slaughter-house, gentle as beeves or as hams.
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
They are singing away, they are singing away,
They are bidding farewell to the realms of the day ...
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
And look at all the faces at the windows peering out!
The bonny lads are going to war, “Hurray! hurray!” they shout,
“The bonny boys, Hurray! Hurray!
They look so happy and so gay!”
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
Some are going to their funerals: I roll with bloodshot eyes.
Some are going to a land of death and never to arise.
Except to sing a “Glory, Hallelujah” to the King
And dance around his throne of gold and warble in a ring—
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
The fields of France will run in little rivers of their blood
And a few, all gashed and gory, will be sprawling in the mud.
Some are going to a land of death, and never to arise,
Some are going to their funerals; I roll with bloodshot eyes—
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
And their lithe and youthful bodies will be broken mannequins
That the Doctors will be cutting, and the bandages and pins
Will take the place of cockroaches and rats with pinkish eyes
And the lice that suck the blood of every soldier ere he dies.
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
And I persuade the sceptic that he’s fighting for a cause
“To fight for Right with all his Might” with fang and tooth and claws,
When I’m rolling he forgets the facts and thinks of youth and glory
And forgets that if he does return he’ll tell another story.
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum! (bis).
Paradise Villas
LIMBS metal-cold and gorgon eyes
With nude enamelled mouth, she lies
Within a vibrant, moaning gloom,
Awaiting canker and the tomb.
And through a shifting polka-light
A clock ticks and the hours take flight,
Brown undertakers drag their feet,
Well drilled to harden at defeat.
One crumpled man with pale, thin hands
To hide his face and sorrow, stands.
With systole, a calm on all,
Diastole, they bear the pall.
A strangled sob. (What shakes the floor?)
The undertakers slam the door.
The orange sashes of the sun
Revolve to blood in unison.
A Morality, or the Twelve Forces of Nature Enchained
THE forest leaves dropped manna on the ground,
Pure amber trailed from ev’ry twining bough,
From flow’r to flow’r the comfortable sound
Of bees would echo mauvely, whilst the plough
Would print his dull design
On undulating hill
And from the rifted rocks
Clear honey would distil.
The heifer overfed on spicy herbs
And so his breath was perfume on the air.
The frisking antelope, unwilling, curbs
Abnormal appetite; he wanders there
With mouth all rosy-stained
From cropping purple meads,
As any parrot’s bill
Or pomegranate seeds.
And, as a multitude of dancing stars,
Bright, pearly dew shone tremulous in grass
Of bladed scimitars that threatened wars
On any prying mortal that would pass.
For only folk with hooves,
The Centaurs’ company,
Had leave to sojourn here—
The Titans’ empery.
The mountains lost their foreheads in the clouds;
The saffron-wingèd manticor of day,
As constellations glimmered from their shrouds,
Had taken sudden fear and flown away.
On fallen blossoms stretched
Beneath ten mango groves
One Titan slept and snored
With nostrils wide as stoves.
Caparisoned in trappings massy gold,
Six Titanesses, heaped on mammoths, ride,
That grunt beneath their weight until they scold
And lacerate each fibrous, knotted hide.
The mountains tremble now,
And cedars spin like tops,
The satyrs hide in caves
Until the thudding stops.
Theia dismounted from her mammoth first,
Adjusting pince-nez, angrily she cried:
“May nephew Zeus, ignoble and accurst,
In anguish die with will unsatisfied!”
The Titans moved their limbs—
Reverberant for miles.
The moonlight chequered lawns
Seemed sprayed with dimpled smiles.
Immediate attack upon the gods
Was counselled now, for Kronos’ fevered ire
Was kindled iron-white; the fiercest rods
Could not avenge indignities so dire.
All chaos now released—
The giants hundred-armed
Shall take them prisoners
Frustrated and alarmed.
The octopus, the dolphin and the whale
Bewildered, seek the bottom of the sea,
Where coral tree-tops clatter in the gale
And frighten mermaids sipping at their tea.
For even here, where peace
And periwinkles dwell,
Those bursts of gas and steam
Jar shrill as booths in hell.
The Titans, when they cough, engender squalls;
Their energy is not consumed by age.
They’d like to stretch their arms and shake St. Paul’s,
But they’re entrapped as mice within a cage.
And none to pity these,
Now bound in sorry plight,
Who played piquet with stars
And shuffled them at night!
My House
THERE is a place of dim, familiar things,
Of contacts vaguely subtle to the touch—
I call it home; in my imaginings
Each detail is of value overmuch.
There is a place where every little nook,
And every cupboard with its special smell,
Are clear upon my mind as in a book,
I love it with a love that’s hard to tell.
There is a garden too where essences
Of flowers queerly mingle in the air,
And butterflies, strange iridescences,
Flutter about when evening enters there.
Sonnet
MY soul is flailed by myriad little whips
That sweetly sting my tender thoughts, but yet
There comes a time when I would fain forget
The small red cruelty that’s in your lips.
Forget your eyes, that ferret me from sleep,
And, if no power can help me from above,
I’ll beat your slender body into love
And bruise your silken throat until you weep.
In violence is love omnipotent—
The subtlest is the fiercely-bitten kiss
That purity and passion interweaves
Until we never know what life has meant
And wait for the supremity of bliss—
The silent thunder floating in the leaves.
Oh! what have I to do with Thee?
OH what have I to do with thee,
Thou pallid, pallid crucifix?
My sins are past all memory,
My soul fit only for the Styx.
Oh what have I to do with thee,
Hanging so limp and stark and cold?
To whom the world in revelry
Looks up ere quickly it grows old.
Oh what have I to do with thee?
The bloody sweat from off thy brow
Bears witness of thy death for me,
Who am so thankless to thee now.
Oh what have I to do with thee,
Thou death-pale Christ still fresh with youth,
Drooping thy head in agony
And anguish for the name of truth?
Oh what have I to do with thee,
Thou pierced by nail and bruised by thong?
Yet spare me in my misery,
For I am weak whilst thou art strong.
Fox-Trot (Dapper Dan)
DISTRESSFULLY aware, he was employed
In dangling clumsy legs into the void,
But the melancholy whistles
Of the ukulele wavered
And a tear-drop semiquavered
From the music, and the thistles
Were extracted
And his feet
Were attracted
By the fleet,
Neat notes ...
Those tightly-fitting pairs of gloves that dance
And beam like a Belasco star
On Broadway, where the houses all advance
To show how very small we are.
And the liquid music throbs
Jujubes,
Crystal-sparkling thoughts in gobs
And cubes—
Flicker-snicker as a scintillating blind
In the breeze,
To appease
The famished Coney Island of the mind.