Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.
Man or mosquito.
You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.
Now then!
It is your trump
It is your hateful little trump
You pointed fiend,
Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:
It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.
Why do you do it?
Surely it is bad policy.
They say you can’t help it.
If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan
A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.
Blood, red blood
Super-magical
Forbidden liquor.
I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely ecstasied
Sucking live blood
My blood.
Such silence, such suspended transport,
Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.
You stagger
As well as you may.
Only your accursed hairy frailty
Your own imponderable weightlessness
Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.