Read Online Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rosemary Tonks
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upstairs in a bus, cursing the waste of time, and pouring my life away on one of those insane journeys across London – while gradually the wavering motion of this precarious glass salon, that flung us about softly like trusses of wheat or Judo Lords, began its medicinal work inside the magnetic landscape of London.
The bus, with its transparent decks of people, trembled. And was as uniquely ceremonious in propelling itself as an eminent Jellyfish with an iron will, by expulsions, valves, hisses, steams, and emotional respirations. A militant, elementary, caparisoned Jellyfish, of the feminine sex, systematically eating and drinking the sea.
I began to feel as battered as though I had been making love all night! My limbs distilled the same interesting wide-awake weariness.
We went forward at a swimmer’s pace, gazing through the walls that rocked the weather about like a cloudy drink from a chemist’s shop – with the depth and sting of the Baltic. The air-shocks, the sulphur dioxides, the gelatin ignitions! We were all of us parcelled up in mud-coloured clothes, dreaming, while the rich perishable ensemble – as stuffy and exclusive as a bag of fish and chips, or as an Eskimo’s bed in a glass drift – cautiously advanced as though on an exercise from a naval college.
The jogging was so consistently idiotic, it induced a feeling of complete security. I gave up my complicated life on the spot; and lay screwed up like an old handkerchief screwed up in a pocket, suspended in time, ready to go to the ends of the earth. O trans-Siberian railways! Balloons! Astronauts!
The Ice-cream Boom Towns
Hurry: we must go south to escape
The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts,
You, with your career, toad-winner, I with my intolerance.
The English seacoast is more oafish than a ham.
We can parade together softly, aloof
Like envoys in coloured clothes – on the promenades,
The stone sleeping-tables where the bourgeois bog down,
And the brilliant sea swims vigorously in and out.
There will be hot-house winds to blunt themselves
Against the wooden bathing-huts, and fall down senseless;
Lilos that swivel in the shallow, iced waves, half-submerged;
Skiffs – trying to bite into a sea that’s watertight!
One whiff of it – careerist – and we fall down senseless,
Bivouacked! Your respirating, steep, electric head,
Filled by its nervous breakdown, will slumber narcotised
By the clear gas that trembles in the sandpit.
Under the pier will be an overdose of shadows – the Atlantic
Irrigates the girders with enormous, disembodied cantos,
Unless you’re quick – they pull the clothes off your soul
To make it moan some watery, half-rotten stanzas.
Night! The plasterboard hotels that rattle shanty bedrooms
On the front, are waiting! Without gods, books, sex or family,
We’ll sink to a vast depth, and lie there, musing, interlocked
Like deportees who undulate to phosphorescent booming.
Addiction to an Old Mattress
No, this is not my life, thank God…
…worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;
Obsessed first by one person, and then
(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;
These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,
They belong to the people in the streets, the others
Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.
Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!
Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.
Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd
That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas
That float themselves about from place to place, and then
Spend
hours
– just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.
Yalta: deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones.
Meanwhile…I live on…powerful, disobedient,
Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,
With these people…who are going to obsess me,
Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable
For this is not my life
But theirs, that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day
The bus, with its transparent decks of people, trembled. And was as uniquely ceremonious in propelling itself as an eminent Jellyfish with an iron will, by expulsions, valves, hisses, steams, and emotional respirations. A militant, elementary, caparisoned Jellyfish, of the feminine sex, systematically eating and drinking the sea.
I began to feel as battered as though I had been making love all night! My limbs distilled the same interesting wide-awake weariness.
We went forward at a swimmer’s pace, gazing through the walls that rocked the weather about like a cloudy drink from a chemist’s shop – with the depth and sting of the Baltic. The air-shocks, the sulphur dioxides, the gelatin ignitions! We were all of us parcelled up in mud-coloured clothes, dreaming, while the rich perishable ensemble – as stuffy and exclusive as a bag of fish and chips, or as an Eskimo’s bed in a glass drift – cautiously advanced as though on an exercise from a naval college.
The jogging was so consistently idiotic, it induced a feeling of complete security. I gave up my complicated life on the spot; and lay screwed up like an old handkerchief screwed up in a pocket, suspended in time, ready to go to the ends of the earth. O trans-Siberian railways! Balloons! Astronauts!
The Ice-cream Boom Towns
Hurry: we must go south to escape
The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts,
You, with your career, toad-winner, I with my intolerance.
The English seacoast is more oafish than a ham.
We can parade together softly, aloof
Like envoys in coloured clothes – on the promenades,
The stone sleeping-tables where the bourgeois bog down,
And the brilliant sea swims vigorously in and out.
There will be hot-house winds to blunt themselves
Against the wooden bathing-huts, and fall down senseless;
Lilos that swivel in the shallow, iced waves, half-submerged;
Skiffs – trying to bite into a sea that’s watertight!
One whiff of it – careerist – and we fall down senseless,
Bivouacked! Your respirating, steep, electric head,
Filled by its nervous breakdown, will slumber narcotised
By the clear gas that trembles in the sandpit.
Under the pier will be an overdose of shadows – the Atlantic
Irrigates the girders with enormous, disembodied cantos,
Unless you’re quick – they pull the clothes off your soul
To make it moan some watery, half-rotten stanzas.
Night! The plasterboard hotels that rattle shanty bedrooms
On the front, are waiting! Without gods, books, sex or family,
We’ll sink to a vast depth, and lie there, musing, interlocked
Like deportees who undulate to phosphorescent booming.
Addiction to an Old Mattress
No, this is not my life, thank God…
…worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;
Obsessed first by one person, and then
(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;
These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,
They belong to the people in the streets, the others
Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.
Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!
Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.
Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd
That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas
That float themselves about from place to place, and then
Spend
hours
– just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.
Yalta: deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones.
Meanwhile…I live on…powerful, disobedient,
Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,
With these people…who are going to obsess me,
Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable
For this is not my life
But theirs, that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day
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