Bedouin of the London Evening (8 page)

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.

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 after day.

A mighty air-sea, fierce and very clean,

Was gliding in across the city.

Oxygenating gusts swept down and

Chloroformed us, in a light too bright to see by.

On pavements – china and milk pages

In a good book, freshly iced by the printing press –

October flash-floated. And you and I were moving

With alert, sane, and possessive steps. At home,

My sofa wrote her creaking, narcoleptic’s Iliad.

My bathroom drank the Styx (bathwater

Of the Underworld). My telephone took all its voices

And gave them to the Furies, to practise with.

While slowly – to gigantic, muddy blows of music

From a pestle and mortar – roof, floor, walls, doors,

My London, stuffed with whisky-dark hotels,

Began to pant like a great ode!

And threw, carelessly, into our veins

Information – all the things we needed to know,

For which there are no words,
not even thoughts.

And this was an ode shaken from a box of rats.

The first sky from October’s aviary

Of bone-dry, thudding skies, joyful, free, and young,

With its wings lifted our souls, heavy as cities,

Effortlessly. We were trustworthy again.

Ritz, Savoy, Claridge’s, hotels full of peacock words,

Were beaten white by Boreas; and as

Electric frosts scratched the windows

Fitting in their awkward childish pane of glowing stone,

We – copied the foaming
with our souls
!

The same ode tore the streets inside us. And lit

Catwalks, sofas, taxis in that city with a light

So bright, even the blind could see by it.

Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one,

For if you mix with the wrong people

– And you yourself may be one of the wrong people –

If you make love to the wrong person,

In some old building with its fabric of dirt,

As clouds of witchcraft, nitro-glycerine, and cake,

Brush by (one autumn night) still green

From our green sunsets…and then let hundreds pass, unlit,

They will do you ferocious, indelible harm!

Far beyond anything you can imagine, jazzy sneering one,

And afterwards you’ll live in no man’s land,

You’ll lose your identity, and never get yourself back, diablotin,

It may have happened already, and as you read this…

Ah, it
has
happened already. I remember, in an old building;

Clouds which had cut themselves on a sharp winter sunset

(With its smoking stove of frosts to keep it cold) went by, bleeding.

His search is desperate!

And the little night-shops of the Underworld

With their kiosks…they know it,

The little bars as full of dust as a stale cake,

None of these places would exist without Orpheus

And how well they know it.

…when the word goes ahead to the next city,

An underworld is hastily constructed,

With bitch-clubs, with cellars and passages,

So that he can go on searching, desperately!

As the brim of the world is lit,

And breath pours softly over the Earth,

And as Heaven moves ahead to the next city

With deep airs, and with lights and rains,

He plunges into Hades, for his search is desperate!

And there is so little risk…down there,

That is the benefit of searching frenziedly

Among the dust-shops and blind-alleys

…there is so little risk of finding her

In Europe’s old blue Kasbah, and he knows it.

I
insist
on vegetating here

In motheaten grandeur. Haven’t I plotted

Like a madman to get here? Well then.

These free days, these side-streets,

Mouldy or shiny, with their octoroon light;

Also, I have grudges, enemies, a religion,

Politics, a new morality – everything!

Kept awake by alcohol and coffee,

Inside her oriental dressing-gown of dust

My soul is always thinking things over, thoroughly.

No wonder my life has grandeur, depth, and crust.

Ah, to desire a certain way of life,

And then to gain it!

What a mockery, what absolute misery,

Dressing-gown hours the tint of alcohol or coffee.

Am I an imbecile of the first water after all?

Yes, I think I can claim – now that all this grandeur,

Depth, and crust is stacked around me – that I am.

As my new life begins, I start smiling at the people around me,

You would think I’d just been given a substantial meal,

I see all their good points.

The railway sheds are full of greenish-yellow electricity,

It’s the great midday hour in London…that suddenly goes brown.

…My stupefying efforts to make money

And to have a life!

Well, I’m leaving; nothing can hold me.

The platforms are dense to the foot,

Rich, strong-willed travellers pace about in the dark daylight,

And how they stink of green fatty soaps, the rich.

More dirty weather…you can hardly see the newspaper stand

With its abominable, ludicrous papers…which are so touching

I ought to laugh and cry, instead of gritting my teeth.

Let me inhale the filthy air for the last time,

Good heavens, how vile it is.… I could take you step by step

Back among the twilight buildings, into my old life…

The trains come in, boiling, caked!

The station half tames them, there’s the sound of blows; the uproar!

And I – I behave as though I’ve been starved of noise,

My intestine eats up this big music

And my new bourgeois soul promptly bursts into flames, in mid-air.

No use pouring me a few last minutes of the old life

From your tank of shadow, filled with lost and rotten people,

I admit: the same flow of gutter-sugar to the brain…

I admit it, London.

No one to see me off – Ah!

I would like to be seen off; it must be the same agonising woman

Who does not want to understand me, and who exposes me in public,

So that I can turn away, choked with cold bile,

And feel myself loved absolutely; the bitch.

These carriages, that have the heavy brown and black bread

Up their sides! But look out for the moment of cowardice,

It’s Charon’s rowing-boat that lurches and fouls my hand

As I climb on – exile, Limboist.

…The way these people get on with their lives; I bow down

With my few deeds and my lotus-scars.

Last minutes…last greenish-yellow minutes

Of the lost and rotten hours…faro, and old winters dimmed,

On which the dark – Yes, the black sugar-crust is forming, London.

I’m leaving! Nothing can hold me!

The trains, watered and greased, scream to be off.

Hullo – I’m already sticking out my elbows for a piece of territory,

I occupy my place as though I can’t get enough of it

– And with what casual, haughty, and specific gestures, incidentally.

Tradesmen, Pigs, regenerative trains – I shall be saved!

I shall go to the centre of Europe; gliding,

As children skate on the diamond lid of the lake

Never touching ground – Xenophile, on the blue-plated meadows.

Oh I shall live off myself, rainclothes, documents,

The great train simmers.… Life is large, large!

…I shall live off your loaf of shadows, London;

I admit it, at the last.

I shall fill up that pit inside me

With my gloomiest thoughts; and then

Spread myself, prostrate, inert, on top of them.

Ah, miserable at last! Felicity.

Those who drink the sea with its fishy breath

Cannot know with what dread I gorge to death

On ideologies – bitter dogma, dialectic, creed;

H.P. sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, chutney,

Filthy kitchen work that swindles, that says ‘feed’,

Dried-up certitude, monkish inhibition, duty,

That helps us to fall downhill, mad as swine.

There, alone, I see my obligation. But let me begin

By describing my tiredness…a word on my depression.

We talk openly, and exchange souls.

Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!

The same double life among the bores and vegetables,

By lamplight in the coffee-houses you have sat it out

Half toad, half Sultan, of the rubbish-heap,

You know the deadly dull excitement; the champagne sleet

Of living; you know all the kitchen details of my ego’s thinking,

When, with our imaginations shuddering,

We move arrogantly into one another’s power,

And the last barriers go down between us….

More at home in a jazz pit than with you,

Hotter on the Baltic, when it fries in ice,

Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood,

My refrigerated body feels the coffin’s touch in every word

You utter, and backs away for ever from your bed.

You know me far too well, O dustbin of the soul;

My sex, her nerve completely broken by it, has constructed

Barriers, thick walls, never to be battered down.

On the other side (with a last mouthful of the double-dutch to spit!)

She looks away; and in a wholly opposite direction.

I can hear the Eros of grey rain, Veganin, and telephones

Inside your voice.

His wings, once cut out of Greek frost,

Are now the tint of an old, polished street.

Softly croaking out clichés, in the narrow passage

With its gas-pipes and fuse-boxes, he makes us

Zoophytes – sponging up gravy, nightmares, dullness!

We fill our veins with soapy water, anxious

To be good enough…for this latrine whore, Eros.

Always, Arabia Desetta; the solitary table

In the restaurant is where we end up,

At the mercy of a salt and pepper pot.

Hosanna! I accept, without quibbling, fly-scrawl,

The carrier-bag of cheap sentences,

On these terms, unless…there is a way to lower them.

I accept. For
my
Eros is atrocious….

If water-clear moonlight and streets

Sharper than greengages are your drink,

Drunkard, you can be cured. One wound from Eros

And your breast can only drink arrows

With its illiterate and fragrant mud,

(Teetotaller, dead drunk on your own blood.)

It’s ludicrous! It’s hopeless.

Shut up your underworlds! Close your hearts!

The century is over. Doors are slamming

In the tragic, casual era. The Eros of dead café tunes

Is in your voice.…

He salts and peppers me another pair of arms.