Scatter it like a hungry pack of hounds,
Worry and tear and grind it into strips,
Ravish and tread on it, then let it be
To crawl before us like the ooze of oil,
A worm of shame, a mean and squamous thing.
Hysteria, guide us! Let our laughter heave,
Swell shriek on shriek, till it engender fear
Like peacocks in abandoned palaces
Whose sharp and melancholy discords ring
And rinse like lightning through the vaulted roofs
At sunset hour, when skies are smeared with blood.
Come, drown the viol’s pallid amber notes,
Submerge the fevered pluckings at the lute,
Let no soft rippling cadences be spilled,
But beat a riot out upon the drums.
Fescennine gongs shall kindle us to blaze,
And thus our fumes, well ballasted, will steer
Towards the placid stars and make them reel.
Our lives are cratered with great pocks and scabs,
Meticulously morselled into pangs,
Birth-scream, death-rattle, straggling years between,
Of childhood and uneasy puberty,
Of adolescence and maturity,
Resolve tormented into slow decay,
Crabbed, agued, rheumatic, cough our lives away.
And some, less fortunate, cough up their blood.
Then let us sing the world’s hilarity!
With plunging pistons let our laughter press,
Lumbering in massed squadrons, vitriol
To blister the anæmic orb of moon.
And there are many hours before the dawn.
The hilewort, nightshade, agrimony-wand
Surrender to the fingers of the breeze,
Lay bare their throats, let loose their floating hair.
Some luckless women bear their children blind
And some hare-lipped and others lunatick
With soft and fumbling brains and shifting eyes,
Who dandle curly flowers, their lolling tongues
Clicking and moist with unrestrained saliva.
Perhaps ’twere better that they were born blind,
Never to see the ugliness of man,
The mirrors of his noisome, clammy thoughts,
Like night-grown fungi pushing on the air,
But hold sweet music palpable, and sounds,
Tones, undertones: a paradise of hues,
And glowing forms in silk embroideries.
The silence, too, will seem a rhythmic motion,
A saraband for snow-white feet to tread,
And not a tortured cripple crouching low
Amongst the blotting shadows of his soul,
To nurse his agony with evil oaths,
The blight-scarred sickly vapours of remorse,
Sputtered and writhing from his twisted lips.
Were a revolver fired with loud report,
The only music welcome to our ears,
The poor blind man would tremble, clutch a chair....
Day after day the limbs of man are gnawed
And flayed by every manner of disease,
Eaten of lice, they seem the spawn of slugs,
And cancer slowly scrabbles at their vitals.
The small-pox ploughs their faces into ruts
And scurvy furrows, strange deformities
Distend and hunch them into monstrous shapes,
Like shadows gripping at realities,
To scrape a livid grave amongst the slime.
Some calcined ashen white with leprosy
Will scream for terror at their dreadful hands,
The touch of which would seem to cause decay
The roots they tear, the pappy fruit they pluck,
And prowling beasts will turn in haste and flee
Before their weary footsteps through the night.
Our quickened hearts have grated on themselves,
We groin with lappered morphews of the mind,
Our wanton mirth has frozen into sorrow,
And we had thought to fashion of our joy
Round crackling pearls to pelt our wine-drenched loves.
But we were to have sung hilarity!
Our clowns are turned into tragedians,
And Pierrot’s chalk-white face is crinkled up
With bitter weeping; roguish Harlequin,
His apple cheeks all wet and blobbed with tears,
Wanders the streets of Bergamo alone.
And floating through the utter silences,
Our sobs well hugely, spasms echoing
To jeer and mock at us, abortive fools,
Who came to sing the world’s hilarity.