Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks Read Free Book Online Page A

their eyes; the planet took in moth and dog.
    Across the rubbishy beloved continent
    Was drawn the circus with its tinsel hutch of midgets;
    Fluorescent tournaments of ladylike brown animals,
    He smelt man’s acid in their tame wool coats.
    Hair as bright as butter scorched his boyhood chin,
    A vein painted and roped against his thigh,
    And his mouth felt her tongue. Returning home
    His dazzled body hunted Africa
    The red yes at the top of six flights of stairs.
    The blind rubbers of the mouth of love!
    The awakening with citron stare!
    Morning: in a sty of tinted women.
    She, on a quilt, bit roses; mammal pink.
    He, a witch scab on his dream, left for infinity
    While his soul peered out of his navel, hideous.
    Streets: uttering bull smoke. Under a wall
    Slum vegetable, its meat leg feeding.
    His arrogance, these nerves which focus ecstasy –
    Accelerations of the bankrupt mud.
    The light; sashes and lustres. The crammed and rustling ball.
    A dog rinsing its jaws in the sweet juice of a lake.
    O thigh purring against raiment! O treacherous
    No man’s land.

Rome
    It’s the café and the boredom, in the semi-dark
    People have a certain rank elegance
    And the dirt-encrusted street with its great jar of water
    Keeps my blood too fresh and truculent for work.
    All these Roman fops going by, the shuffling,
    The dripping waterjar and the dark café
    …built for stealing people…
    And the walls are full of musk, it’s baked into them.
    The temptation to live! Even a bad conversation…
    In a street that’s built for boredom
    And odorous with water. When there’s less time
    (My life, my work, my hopes!) every step leads to an assignation.
    It’s the élan of café life on a hot night,
    The street that’s full of modern love-talk, like a room,
    It’s the jade-breath of the waterjar…that is mortality
    For the blood that is too insolent for work.

Hypnos and Warm Winters
    Europe is all steam and leaves and love-affairs!
    Old streets – they’re bathrooms of steam and water
    Where Hypnos follows me all day in a silk dressing-gown,
    Like two old bores we move through the great months of rain.
    Suppose I’m coming from my love-affair…
    While the steam-heated rain pours down,
    And yawning takes the wax and starch out of my skin,
    It’s the last straw having to describe the night
    Again in detail to my heart – as if it wasn’t there,
    When Hypnos, like a twentieth-century bachelor
    Bored easily, is lying full length on my bed
    – With the effrontery to add to his art the spice
    Of fanning me to sleep – with sheets of my own verse.

Escape!
    It is among the bins and dormitories of cities
    Where the busker wins his bread
    By turning music on a spit, and the heavens
    Have the dirt of the great sty upon their sides,
    That one goes to gormandise upon Escape!
    Where alleys are so narrow that the Fates
    Like meatporters can scarcely pass
    With their awkward burden in its muslin bandages,
    And carry off the rabble safely to their graves;
    Where every shadow opens a bordel
    At sunset, as decay moves
    Into cloakrooms of blue velvet in red cheese;
    These are the last of the great kitchens!
    And your soul knows half the flavour
    Lies underfoot in dirty flagstones,
    When like a chef it makes a point of bringing in
    To show before you dine – Escape,
    Still active in a net,
    Auroras, icy champagnes upon its wings!

Story of a Hotel Room
    Thinking we were safe – insanity!
    We went in to make love. All the same
    Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
    Then in the gloom…
    …And who does not know that pair of shutters
    With the awkward hook on them
    All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
    We set about acquiring one another
    Urgently! But on a temporary basis
    Only as guests – just guests of one another’s senses.
    But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
    Because the bed of cold, electric linen
    Happens to be illicit….
    To make love as well as that is ruinous.
    Londoner, Parisian, someone should