Bedouin of the London Evening (7 page)

I have lived it, and lived it,

My nervous, luxury civilisation,

My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

…Their idea of literature is hopeless.

Make them drink their own poetry!

Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he

Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here

And digs himself into the sofa.

He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks

– Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to
everything

It’s……damnably depressing.

(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning

In the little dish… And when he calls out: ‘Ha!’

Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)

On my bad days (and I’m being broken

At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he

Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,

Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw.…

I grow coarser; and more modern (
I
, who am driven mad

By my ideas; who go nowhere;

Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)

All right. I admit everything, everything!

Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)

He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it
horribly
, when someone’s ill

At the last minute; and they specially fly in

A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her

With her arias.           Old goat! Blasphemer!

He wants to help her with her arias!

No, I…go to the cinema,

I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street

Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum.

…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas

Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,

The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs

And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,

And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.

…The drugged and battered Philistines

Are all around you in the auditorium…

And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,

He wants to make me think his thoughts

And they will be
enormous
, dull – (just the sort

To keep away from).

…when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking

And he wants to face the international situation…

Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

– All this sitting about in cafés to calm down

Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!

The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.

My café-nerves are breaking me

With black, exhausting information.

Outside that house, I stood like a dog;

The window was mysterious, with its big, dull pane

Where the mud pastes are thrown by dark, alkaline skies

That glide slowly along, keeping close to the ground.

– But for the raging disgust which shook me

So that my throat was scratched by her acid

(Whose taste is the true Latin of culture) –

I could have lived the life of these roads.

That piece of filthy laurel moves up and down,

And then the dead rose-leaves with their spat-on look

Where the sour carbon lies…under

The sash of the window comes the smell of stewing innards,

With the freshly washed lavatory – I know where

The old linoleum has its platinum wet patches

And the disinfectant dries off in whiffs.

Hellish, abominable house where I have been young!

With your insane furnishings – above all

The backs of dressing-tables where the dredged wood

Faces the street, raw. And the window

With its servant-maid’s mystery, which contains
nothing
,

Where I bowed over the ruled-up music books

With their vitreous pencilling, and the piano keys

That touched water. How forlornly my strong, destructive head

Eats again the reek of the sash window.

I understand you, frightful epoch,

With your jampots, brothels, paranoias,

And your genius for fear, you can’t stop shuddering.

Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.

I know that to get through to you, my epoch,

I must take a diamond and scratch

On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message

And my joy – sober, piercing, twilit.

In the hotel where you live, my Kurdish epoch,

Your opera of typewriters and taperecorders

Boils the hotel with a sumptuous oompah!

…(…as my heavy-drinking diamond writes)

Boils it! And loosens the bread-grey crusts

Of stucco from the 19th Century…with an opera

Of broken, twilit poetry

Built from your dust-drowned underworld of sighs.

Epoch, we are lonely. For we follow hotel berbers

Of the past, those who drift in corridors, whose tents

And whose derisive manuscripts are dipped in marble

By your backward glance.

Criminal, you took a great piece of my life,

And you took it under false pretences,

That piece of time

– In the clear muscles of my brain

I have the lens and jug of it!

Books, thoughts, meals, days, and houses,

Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote,

You took it – leaving mud and cabbage stumps.

And, Criminal, I damn you for it (very softly).

My spirit broke her fast on you. And, Turk,

You fed her with the breath of your neck

– In my brain’s clear retina

I have the stolen love-behaviour.

Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat,

Gulped it, like a flunkey with erotica.

And very softly, Criminal, I
damn
you for it.

Events pushed me into this corner;

I live in a fixed routine,

With my cardboard attaché case full of rotting books.

…If only I could trust my blood! Those damn foreign women

Have a lot to answer for, marrying into the family –

– The mistakes, the wrong people, the half-baked ideas,

And their beastly comments on everything. Foul.

But irresistibly amusing, that is the whole trouble.

With my cardboard suitcase full of occidental literature

I reached this corner, to educate myself

Against the sort of future they flung into my blood –

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.

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.

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 won't leave in peace,

In the souks where the young pair off, dog-tired and dirty,

On a February evening…

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, it's atrocious. Certainly it's literature.

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 century…

…And burns you, gutter-polished citizen,

With my story – the drifting novocain of my horizon,

My oases, and my mirages, they're 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 – and more despair. Oh yes; I'm a writer

Daring enough to make the sand my paper,

It's done by
living
, ignoramuses. Isn't there always

The unreliability, the cool mouth-bite of a beloved body?

That's the desert – where I hurry!…slowly, very slowly,

Sometimes…almost stock-still in a sand-drift…hurrying.

While dusty mobs pass, driven by the moon.

…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 you're crammed, stuffed to the brim, at dusk,

With hell's 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.

*     *     *

I was walking in this shadow-bathing century

Pouring sand for my own desert

From my desolate high spirits…

……but
recklessly
, my arab and my citizen.