lycanthropia

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.

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 sumptous 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
An those 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.

Thinking we were safe—insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about aquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests—just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit…
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
—If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.