A CLOUD in trousers
--
"your thought,
musing on a sodden brain
like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch.
i'll taunt with a bloody morsel of heart;
and satiate my insolent, caustic contempt.
no grey hairs streak my soul,
no grandfatherly fondness there!
i shake the world with the might of my voice,
and walk -- handsome,
twentytwoyearold.
tender souls!
you play your love on a fiddle,
and the crude club their love on a drum.
but you cannot turn yourself inside out,
like me, and be just bare lips!
come and be lessoned --
prim officiates of the angelic league,
lisping in drawing-room cambric.
you, too, who leaf your lips like a cook
turns the pages of a cookery book.
if you wish,
i shall rage on raw meat;
or, as the sky changes its hue,
if you wish,
i shall grow irreproachably tender:
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
i deny the existence of blossoming Nice!
again in song I glorify
men as crumpled as hospital beds,
and women as battered as proverbs"
