You seem forever writin'
 Yer Songs of Victory;
An' “Wear the beatin' colours,
 An' wear them back with me!”
You seem forever whinin':
 “O come an' look at me!”
Yer mind forever narrers—
 Say anythin' yer can,
I'm one as wore the arrers,
 An' wore 'em like a man!

While you slept in the mornin'
 An' had yer cup of tea,
An' dreamed, no doubt, with scornin'
 Of better blokes maybe—
Like Ginger Mick an' Stinker,
 An' Snorkey, Snout an' me—
Then I was busy fillin'
 With loo'-warm cornmeal stoo,

Hi noble Stafford , who from Buckingham ,
Eternally deserving nobly came,
No flattering lynes the Muses you afford,
Respecting truly whose worth honour'd Lord,
You well deserve more then can well be said.

Soe then, Right noble Lord, afford your aid,
That your high sterne may rightly placed be,
As is your true deserved dignity:
Firme then will say, Stafford did honour carne,
Freely when hee Afforded an high Stern ,
O may your honour with your age increase,
Resplending forth your truest noblenesse.

Because personal poetry is no longer
the dominant mode unless, of course,
you are an Other or can tolerate the overkill
of Persephone spitting out her seed,
I'll be impersonal as dust, the lord
protector of less, as self-indulgent as an egg.

Let's blame it on the brain:
I was going to stay asleep until
I could stand music. Smudge of a day through lace,
nothing moves when we lose delight.
I'd been studying inner forms.

Luckily, while I was voodooed numb
and the sun's yolk hardened
over our home, I hadn't made many promises

Thy way is in the deep, O Lord!
E'en there we'll go with thee:
We'll meet the tempest at thy word,
And walk upon the sea.

Poor tremblers at his rougher wind,
Why do we doubt him so?
Who gives the storm a path will find
The way our feet shall go.

A moment may his hand seem lost, —
Drear moment of delay;
We cry, " Lord, help the tempest-tost!"
And safe we're borne away.

O happy soul of faith divine,
Thy victory how sure!
The love that kindles joy is thine,
The patience to endure.

A van knocked down the kid playing tag.
The rest of us stood on a manhole cover
above Brooklyn's slurring waste
and beneath the elevated train

that sawed the sun and moon in two.
The driver waved a fifth
of Four Roses like a bad wand
and we disappeared

while tenements emptied to the curb
where Alice Gallon sang " Chantilly Lace "
until her mother slapped
her face with a sauce spoon

with some tomato sauce still on it.
I went home to parts of a steer
bobbing in broth, and Uncle Dugan
exhaling Pall Malls toward

INSCRIBED TO HENRY W. LONGFELLOW .

With thee, dear friend, though far away,
I walk, as on some vanished day,
And all the past returns in beautiful array.

With thee I still pace to and fro
Along the airy portico,
And gaze upon the flowers and river winding slow

And there, as in some fairy realm,
I hear the sweet birds overwhelm
The fainting air with music from the lofty elm.

Address'd to some Ladies of the Author's Acquaintancce in Town, inclosing the preceeding Song.

Least you should think I mean to flight,
I've seiz'd my Quill thus soon to write:
I fled from Town t' avoid the Times,
Least they shou'd plunge me into Rhimes;
Lo! the Effects — why, Ladies, here,
Still more provoking they appear,
Already I've engag'd — a Proof;
I tell you nothing but strict Truth;
Mark the inclos'd — What cou'd I say?
A Monarch's Cause demands a Lay:
King Derrick 's Dignity to save,
His tott'ring Power from the Grave,

He promised me a sail on his Swan
but off the bay
he steered wrong
and soon we faced a fork
swung by the Dark One.
Charles had the tender jowls
of a new senator,
no rent worries ever pitched
their tents there,
packed up, pitched again.
The greasy, dented cheeks of Satan
mirrored my own lumped
and pointy features, no symmetry.
He asked us to explain who had touched
our lives, moved us most, fathered
our fates, the friends who failed us.
Charles confessed first: he never
had a second thought, just pounced.

He loved a girl when his hair was brown,
And his heart was young and tender,
And she took him up and she took him down,
So he's got no time for that gender.
He's a " whaler " now with a patched-up boat
By a Murrumbidgee station,
With an old he-dog and a William-goat
And a cat of the Thomas persuasion.

There's a Nanny-goat's skin with the head and horns
On a gum-tree tall and shady;
And hair like a long-lost gin's that warns
The native dusky lady.
There's the skin of a female dog as well,
And, nailed up a little bit higher,

Ever right honour, and true noblenes
Declared in your vertues, you expresse,
Warding your self with more then common ward ,
According to your birth, which high regard
Rightly draws to your self, so that withall
Doubtles y'are warded with a double wall.

Seeing your high and truly noble birth,
Each one confesse y'are warded well on earth;
Your worthy vertues when we have in eye,
More warded you are then by birth, we cry:
O, then pursue still in the vertuous trade,
Rightly whereby more warded you are made.