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

have warned us
    That without permanent intentions
    You have absolutely no protection
    – If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
    The concurring deep love of the heart
    Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

Bedouin of the London Evening
    Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
    Great city, filled with wind and dust!
    Bedouin of the London evening,
    On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.
    And like a medium who falls into a trance
    So deep, she can be scratched to death
    By her Familiar – at its leisure!
    I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
    While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.
    I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
    My private modern life has gone to waste.

Boy in the Lane
    in search of origin
    This lane at zenith; when its hair is warm.
    Here’s the magician with his Pedigree of Snouts
    Whose ransack shimmers after him.
    And here’s the lair in music trousseau where his lout’s
    Foot beat out a bright bed. The Atlas stuffs his shoes
    With tussore. A dark animal
    Pulls August out of the hedge, the linctus dropping as it chews,
    Eyes him with the clear gog of Lucifer, the edible
    Hot silk of the dream pasture in its mouth.
    Geography lays eggs and pearls.
    Thirst! And the ceiling advances with luminous hulls.
    Panes of weather are left flashing in the path;
    Quagmarks of angels in the mud,
    The blue thrash of the Jesus fairy. And the youth
    Detonates this spoor to drive the Magnifico in thud
    And glare of blades against his ear;
    The heavenly quops vamped by the tender oilskin of the drum!
    His breast reports the code, as a snake dines off some rare
    Tattoo its literate satin muscle cannot name.
    Archbrute of quadrillion Kingbeats!
    But the north flies a magnetic blue roan cloud
    Whose touchwaters on the scented dirt of the sphere
    Set – in jay’s wing fathoms. And Mud
    Looks up through this aquarium of rain, from her
    Queasy seance under the grope of the great knotted lips
    Of riverpike, whose tarnished flesh
    Drinks the umber hangings of the bottom. This boy who clips
    Himself a Dynasty of Wings – is hers! Hers to the ghost rash
    On his lily-clapping vellum, that strokes her lie to death.

Fog Peacocks
    We were the city’s young, and our veins
    If they ran pale from the bad food
    Even so they carried the infernos of its moods,
    For we were the children of the rotting peacock
    Of a passer-by, seen in a mist of scorching bitumen.
    Oh you bound homeward when the cloud
    Of gold gas shone behind the house,
    With a captured insect, once half Helium
    Now only spurs and gauze,
    And the green liquor pool in jars of glass…
    We were not less whose city like an alcohol
    Spoke hotly to the artery; and we already
    Knew love’s streets – where at the fall
    Of thermal, phosphorescent dusk
    There is a drop that goes down sheer to Hell.
    Those evenings you were mutinous
    Against the tyranny of kitchen tables where
    The flat iron cools its mirror of blue ore
    And grip of hot rag,
    And the old blanket smokes like humus,
    We were the young, derisive metropolitans
    Soon to be mashed flat as a wet coalsack by skies
    Of ochre, full of malice, coating the trees with emulsion,
    And you would have to drag for our disgust in sewers,
    And break the cobwebs reaching an illusion.

Poet as Gambler
    Now like a gambler on an errand
    Of my wasted youth, when gutter and heavens
    Were my lottery, and my estate
    A shirt of water-lotus that the night wind
    Loved to rock as I went to do my gambling
    Alone at dusk in the dark city
    To out-bid Eternity – with nothing
    But a blouse of lilies flooding my lapel
    A wallet stuffed with fever for my stake,
    All night until the early hours when stowaways
    Will grope for the unknown and illustrate
    Their clothes with lustrous bruises as they go aboard
    And all the ropes and fabrics of a boat
    Are heavy with cold nectars in the dawn,
    Creation, glimmering and surly underfoot,
    And Egypt drowsy on a cake of opium,
    I went with nothing but the shirt upon my