To Grant Rice
Beyond Arcturus, in a peevish wind,
I met a rumpled devil beating home.
“And whence, poor Fiend,” I challenged, “hast
thou come
With ragged plumage ravelled out behind
And splintered teeth and lamps all blear and blind?
What Fate hath bent a skillet o'er thy dome?”
He sighed, and in that sigh I read a tome
Of bleeding sorrows and
an aching mind.
“Rough Stuff,” he moaned, “was what I got for
mine!
It was fierce Virtue put me on the bum,
Trampled my slats and wronged my winsome face—
Once I was loved and called the Angel Wine!
Kicked hellward now, and hurtling out through space,
I am known only as the Demon Rum!”
VII—THE LAST CASE OF GIN
To Loren Palmer
The Tullywub is singing by the Willywinkle's grotto
His passionate devotion, though he knows he hadn't
ought to,
And she wipes away a teardrop with a little furtive
fin;
She is fluttered, but she's frightened by his outburst
of emotion
In their somewhat formal corner of a rather proper
ocean—
And I can understand 'em, for I've got a crate of gin.
Interpretative theses on the psychochemic state
Induced in the batrachia by fear or love or hate
I find are rather easy since I've opened up the crate,
And I'm gonna be a scientist by morning.
A Willywinkle's seldom a sprightly thing or elfish,
But morally she's rigid as the most exclusive shell-
fish;
She cans her rash admirer, but she cans him with a
sigh!
An analytic novel might be reared upon the basis
Of a very earnest study of the looks upon their
faces
And their brave renunciation when they sobbed and
said good-by.
I claim that the transmission of their fortitude and
pain
To succeeding generations will improve the moral
strain
Of the species here considered and their loss result
in gain;
And I wish I had some Angostura Bitters!
I have a strong impression of the immanence of
morals
In this quite extensive cosmos, from castor beans
to corals,
And Science and Religion, I will tell the world, are
one;
I should prove it, gentle reader, had we leisure time
before us,
I should prove it or expire in the act of hurling
Taurus—
I wonder where the dickens has that silly corkscrew
gone?
I find, as I grow older, the pert Subliminal
Keeps butting in to chatter with egoistic gall:
Romance I meditated; this isn't that at all—
But anyhow I have some limes and siphons!