THE TONGUELESS ONE
THE SHRINE IN THE MIST
I peer at you, O glutton, well-fed, nigger-hipped, bag-eyed; at you I am peering,
And wonder whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of your belly—
Wondering whether the Truth be not a belch and a leer and a lusty young wench.
And I peer at you, too, O Gautama, the purpled renunciant, great Shadow-Eater:
I peer at you there on the roadside, where you sit ’neath the Bo tree, motionless, graven as death, solved in thy pulseless Nirvana—
Wondering whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of thy brain.
Am I mocked? Am I followed? Who goes there?
Hands off! thou Vile Thing!
Thou knowest not me nor the thing that I seek:
The Shrine that is set in a mist—over THERE, just BEYOND.
MY COMIC PERSPECTIVE
Well, here am I now, a butt-end, awaiting translation.
The world I have found a small box with endless false bottoms;
I have come to the tomb, a little clay box which, too, is false bottomed:
I call into it, laugh and halloo, “Come, TO-MORROW!”
THE PEEPER
THE-CIRCLE-THAT-LOOKS-LIKE-A-LINE
Briskly Man in his morn steps forth, guards up.
He bows, he smiles, and his eyes, foci of his myriad lusts, seek in the dust for the thing that slipped, eel-like, through his fingers in the yesterday.
At night, within his locked and barred room, his hope-fattened face dismantles.
His eyes grow knotted troubled lights, jaws sag—weary, oh, weary is he!
Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!
Youth! Youth! how gay his step!
His soul scents Truth—he is off like a hound on the trail, white brow upturned, the old ecstatic urge in his eye:
His hands would hook her now!
Up! Up! he reaches and steps off the precipice of the world.
A Hag bends over him, a Hag whose face is a lutescent leer, eyes steel-grayed by a knowledge of the pitiless truths.
Eternity rings with her glee-shrieks as she gathers his bones—bones that shall feed her quenchless immemorial fires in the nether hollows—
Hollows of the mocking shapes,
Hollows of metallic laughs,
Hollows of the wan gray spectres.
Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!