Classic Poem

I

Say, kid, I'm in a candid mood;
The kind of mood that silence
The babbling dampness of my character.
I'm feeling as improbable
As an over-worked Grecian myth
Fainting amid the smells of a slum.
Now, Hypocrisy,
Always slinks along
Winking an opaque eye at reality.
But when he spies a fantasy
He feels disgraced and leaves in haste.
What's the use of telling a lie to a lie?
So, since I'm only a dream,
Listen to my candid scream.
You like to press a rouged cheek
Against your obscurity,
Like a third-rate poet
Pasting a sunset upon his emptiness.
Bashful scalywags like you
Can seduce the eloquent delusion
Of time and give it a speechless limp.
The insincere trickle of your words
Was neither silence nor sound
But falteringly tempted both,
Like a tiny fountain unnoticed
At the feet of two large coquettes.
The intricate laziness
Of your dimpled face
Received a petulantly naked
Ghost of thought, and seized it without desire.
Again it held the furbished effigies
Of sensuality
And tried to give them life
From the weariness of my pinched, mauled face.
Yet, I could have endured you
But for the fact that your moustache
Scraped across my lips
Like a clumsy imitation of passion.
Trivial insults have tumbled down
The pillared complacency of empires
Just as the thrust of your mouth
Tripped my mercenary balance.
My lover now has the face of a dog,
With each corner of his lips
Pointing to a different Heaven,
Yet his greed and melancholy
Sometimes fondle each other
Upon the pressures of his mouth,
And the slobbering monotony of his kiss
Does not dissolve my stoicism.
Women who measure their gifts for lovers
Never hope for more than this.


II

UNLITERARY AND SHAMELESS


Your cloistered naughtiness
Makes me as boisterous
As a savage attending
A minstrel-show of regrets.
The pampered carefulness
With which you distil a series
Of standardized perfumes from life
Takes its promenade
Between the realms of sanity and madness.
You are too precise to be quite sane
And too evasive to be insane,
And all that you have left me
Is a mood of windy sadness —
Emotions becoming verbose
In a last thin effort
To persuade themselves that they loved
A jewel that slipped from your fingers.
Your mind is a limpid warehouse
Filled with other men's creations,
And you pilfer a bit from each,
Disguising the scheme of your culture.
I would rather be a naked fool
Than a full-gowned erudite
Imitation of other men's brains.
I shall marry a desperado
And give him strength with which to paint
Black angels and muscular contortions
On panels of taffeta.