Read Online Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks - Free Book Online
Authors: Rosemary Tonks
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–
The events, the people, the ideas – the
ideas
!
And I alone know how disreputable and foreign.
But as a thinker, as a professional water-cabbage,
From my desk, of course, I shall dissolve events
As if they were of no importance…none whatever.
…And those women are to blame!
I was already half-way into my disreputable future,
When I found that they had thrown into my blood
With the mistakes, the people, the ideas (ideas indeed!)
This little cardboard suitcase…damned
Beloved women…and these books, opium, beef, God.
At my desk (lit by its intellectual cabbage-light)
I found them – and they are irresistibly amusing –
These thoughts that have been thrown into my blood.
Hydromaniac
I was leaning across your chest;
Like a marble-smith, I made pencilmarks over
Its vanilla skin, its young man’s skin,
Refreshing as the pleasure page in a daily newspaper.
I sniffed you to quench my thirst,
As one sniffs in the sky huge, damp sheets of lightning
That bring down the chablis, hocks, moselles,
And tear cold, watery holes.
Those soaking wet chords from Brahms (…their overflow,
On which you could float a canoe)
Are not more refreshing! Nor is the fragrant gin-fizz
From the glass joint of a rod of grass.
My life cries out for water!
Haughty sheets of newsprint, lightning, music, skin!
Haughty bathrooms where the lukewarm swimmer
In his water-colour coat of soap is king.
Students in Bertorelliâs
Winter! We pour our politics into the brown walls,
These little eating-houses run with grease like a meat chop.
Each man stuffs himself with ideas, he eats his pork newspaper.
With two or three cabbage banknotes you can listen to the fog-horn,
The striking of the great clocks (how terrible), the alarm-bells, without fear.
We are ready to slide away into the nearest gutter,
Like old Paris hotels the fogs wonât leave in peace,
In the souks where the young pair off, dog-tired and dirty,
On a February eveningâ¦
Nothing holds us upright but some cold green diction, banknotes, a penis.
And they talk of Literature!
But after all, give me again that new green diction.
Oh yes, itâs atrocious. Certainly itâs literature.
The Desert Wind Ãlite
I am outside life, and pour the sand
For my own desert,
recklessly
.
But if some flame splashes over from my arab hours
Into your dismal, shadow-bathing centuryâ¦
â¦And burns you, gutter-polished citizen,
With my story â the drifting novocain of my horizon,
My oases, and my mirages, theyâre built of tears
And sheets and sheets of grey glass like an onion,
My story written in the sand! Laziness, despair,
Worldly pressures, travelling, & dirty clothes, the need for sleep,
Contempt for time â and more despair. Oh yes; Iâm a writer
Daring enough to make the sand my paper,
Itâs done by
living
, ignoramuses. Isnât there always
The unreliability, the cool mouth-bite of a beloved body?
Thatâs the desert â where I hurry!â¦slowly, very slowly,
Sometimesâ¦almost stock-still in a sand-driftâ¦hurrying.
While dusty mobs pass, driven by the moon.
â¦If it blasts you, modernists fobbed off
With dingy souls, inside a century that growls
For its carafe of shady air, oblivion, and psychiatric mash,
Start Drinking! I shall seduce you. From my desk,
The Soho of my drifting, yellowed sentences
Calls out your name⦠Choked-up joy splashes over
From this poem and youâre crammed, stuffed to the brim, at dusk,
With hellâs casual and jam-green happiness!!
Ah, pour yourself a desert, man-in-the-shadow-skin.
This last minute enamel re-satanises Europe,
And you will become my arab and my citizen.
* Â Â *Â Â Â Â *
I was walking in this shadow-bathing century
Pouring sand for my own desert
From my desolate high spiritsâ¦
â¦â¦but
recklessly
, my arab and my citizen.
An Old-fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes
I was sitting
The events, the people, the ideas – the
ideas
!
And I alone know how disreputable and foreign.
But as a thinker, as a professional water-cabbage,
From my desk, of course, I shall dissolve events
As if they were of no importance…none whatever.
…And those women are to blame!
I was already half-way into my disreputable future,
When I found that they had thrown into my blood
With the mistakes, the people, the ideas (ideas indeed!)
This little cardboard suitcase…damned
Beloved women…and these books, opium, beef, God.
At my desk (lit by its intellectual cabbage-light)
I found them – and they are irresistibly amusing –
These thoughts that have been thrown into my blood.
Hydromaniac
I was leaning across your chest;
Like a marble-smith, I made pencilmarks over
Its vanilla skin, its young man’s skin,
Refreshing as the pleasure page in a daily newspaper.
I sniffed you to quench my thirst,
As one sniffs in the sky huge, damp sheets of lightning
That bring down the chablis, hocks, moselles,
And tear cold, watery holes.
Those soaking wet chords from Brahms (…their overflow,
On which you could float a canoe)
Are not more refreshing! Nor is the fragrant gin-fizz
From the glass joint of a rod of grass.
My life cries out for water!
Haughty sheets of newsprint, lightning, music, skin!
Haughty bathrooms where the lukewarm swimmer
In his water-colour coat of soap is king.
Students in Bertorelliâs
Winter! We pour our politics into the brown walls,
These little eating-houses run with grease like a meat chop.
Each man stuffs himself with ideas, he eats his pork newspaper.
With two or three cabbage banknotes you can listen to the fog-horn,
The striking of the great clocks (how terrible), the alarm-bells, without fear.
We are ready to slide away into the nearest gutter,
Like old Paris hotels the fogs wonât leave in peace,
In the souks where the young pair off, dog-tired and dirty,
On a February eveningâ¦
Nothing holds us upright but some cold green diction, banknotes, a penis.
And they talk of Literature!
But after all, give me again that new green diction.
Oh yes, itâs atrocious. Certainly itâs literature.
The Desert Wind Ãlite
I am outside life, and pour the sand
For my own desert,
recklessly
.
But if some flame splashes over from my arab hours
Into your dismal, shadow-bathing centuryâ¦
â¦And burns you, gutter-polished citizen,
With my story â the drifting novocain of my horizon,
My oases, and my mirages, theyâre built of tears
And sheets and sheets of grey glass like an onion,
My story written in the sand! Laziness, despair,
Worldly pressures, travelling, & dirty clothes, the need for sleep,
Contempt for time â and more despair. Oh yes; Iâm a writer
Daring enough to make the sand my paper,
Itâs done by
living
, ignoramuses. Isnât there always
The unreliability, the cool mouth-bite of a beloved body?
Thatâs the desert â where I hurry!â¦slowly, very slowly,
Sometimesâ¦almost stock-still in a sand-driftâ¦hurrying.
While dusty mobs pass, driven by the moon.
â¦If it blasts you, modernists fobbed off
With dingy souls, inside a century that growls
For its carafe of shady air, oblivion, and psychiatric mash,
Start Drinking! I shall seduce you. From my desk,
The Soho of my drifting, yellowed sentences
Calls out your name⦠Choked-up joy splashes over
From this poem and youâre crammed, stuffed to the brim, at dusk,
With hellâs casual and jam-green happiness!!
Ah, pour yourself a desert, man-in-the-shadow-skin.
This last minute enamel re-satanises Europe,
And you will become my arab and my citizen.
* Â Â *Â Â Â Â *
I was walking in this shadow-bathing century
Pouring sand for my own desert
From my desolate high spiritsâ¦
â¦â¦but
recklessly
, my arab and my citizen.
An Old-fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes
I was sitting
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