True Confession

1 Today, recovering from influenza, I begin, having nothing worse to do, This autobiography that ends a Half of my life I'm glad I'm through. O Love, what a bloody hullaballoo I look back at, shaken and sober, When that intemperate life I view From this temperate October. To nineteen hundred and forty-seven I pay the deepest of respects, For during this year I was given Some insight into the other sex. I was a victim, till forty-six, Of the rosy bed with bitches in it; But now, in spite of all pretexts, I never sleep a single minute. O fellow sailor on the tossing sea, O fleeting virgin in the night, O privates, general in lechery, Shun, shun the bedroom like a blight: Evade, O amorous acolyte, That pillow where your heart can bury - For if the thing was stood upright It would become a cemetery. I start with this apostrophe To all apostles of true love: With your devotion visit me, Give me the glory of the dove That dies of dereliction. Give True love to me, true love to me, And in two shakes I will prove It's false to you and false to me. Bright spawner, on your sandbank dwell Coldblooded as a plumber's pipe - The procreatory ocean swell Warming, till they're over ripe, The cockles of your cold heart, will Teach us true love can instil Temperature into any type. Does not the oyster in its bed Open a yearning yoni when The full moon passes overhead Feeling for pearls? O nothing, then, Too low a form of life is, when Love, abandoning the cloister, Can animate the bedded oyster, The spawning tiddler, and men. Thus all of us, the pig and prince, The prince and the psychiatrist, Owe everything to true love, since How the devil could we exist If our parents had never kissed? All biographies, therefore, - No matter what else they evince - Open, like prisons, with adore. Remember, when you love another, Who demonstrably is a bitch, Even Venus had a mother Whose love, like a silent aitch, Incepted your erotic itch. Love, Love has the longest history, For we can tell an ape his father Begot him on a mystery. I, born in Essex thirty-four Essentially sexual years ago, Stepped down, looked around, and saw I had been cast a little low In the social register For the friends whom I now know. Is a constable a mister? Bob's your uncle, even so. Better men than I have wondered Why one's father could not see That at one's birth he had blundered. His ill-chosen paternity Embarrasses the fraternity Of one's friends who, living Huysmans, Understandably have wondered At fatherhood permitted policemen. So I, the son of an administer Of the facts of civil laws Delight in uncivil and even sinister Violations. Thus my cause Is simply, friend, to hell with yours. In misdemeanours I was nourished - Learnt, like altruists in Westminster, By what duplicities one flourished. At five, but feeling rather young, With a blue eye beauty over six, Hand in hand and tongue to tongue I took a sin upon my sex. Sin? It was pleasure. So I told her. And ever since, persisting in Concupiscences no bolder My pleasure's been to undress sin. What's the point of a confession If you have nothing to confess? I follow the perjuring profession - O poet, lying to impress! - But the beautiful lie in a beautiful dress Is the least heinous of my transgressions: When a new one's added, 'O who was it? ' Sigh the skeletons in my closet. Ladybird, ladybird, come home, come home: Muse and mistress wherever you are. The evening is here and in the gloom Each bisexual worm burns like a star And the love of man is crepuscular. In the day the world. But, at night, we Lonely on egoes dark and far Apart as worlds, between sea and sea, Yearn on each other as the stars hold One another in fields together. O rose of all the world, enfold Each weeping worm against the cold Of the bitter ego's weather; To warm our isothermal pride Cause sometimes, Love, another To keep us by an unselfish side. The act of human procreation - The rutting tongue, the grunt and shudder, The sweat, the reek of defecation, The cradle hanging by the bladder, The scramble up the hairy ladder, And from the thumping bed of Time Immortality, a white slime, Sucking at its mother's udder - The act of human procreation - The sore dug plugging, the lugged out bub, The small man priming a lactation, The grunt, the drooping teat, the rub Of gum and dug, the slobbing kiss: Behold the mater amabilis, Sow with a saviour, messiah and cow, Virgin and piglet, son and sow: The act of human procreation, - O crown and flower, O culmination Of perfect love throughout creation - What can I compare it to? O eternal butterflies in the belly, O trembling of the heavenly jelly, O miracle of birth! Really We are excreted, like shit. 2 The Church, mediatrix between heaven And human fallibility Reminds us that the age of seven Inaugurates the Reason we Spend our prolonged seniority Transgressing. Of that time I wish I could recount a better story Than finding a shilling and a fish. But memory flirts with seven veils Peekabooing the accidental And what the devil it all entails Only Sigmund Freud suspects. I think my shilling and my fish Symbolised a hidden wish To sublimate these two affects: Money is nice and so is sex. The Angel of Reason, descending On my seven year old head Inscribed this sentence by my bed: The pleasure of money is unending But sex satisfied is sex dead. I tested to see if sex died But, all my effort notwithstanding, Have never found it satisfied. Abacus of Reason, you have been The instrument of my abuse, The North Star I have never seen, The trick for which I have no use: The Reason, gadget of schoolmasters, Pimp of the spirit, the smart alec, Proud engineer of disasters, I see phallic: you, cephalic. Happy those early days when I Attended an elementary school Where seven hundred infant lives Flittered like gadflies on the stool (We discovered that contraceptives Blown up like balloons, could fly): We memorised the Golden Rule: Lie, lie, lie, lie. For God's sake, Barker. This is enough Regurgitated obscenities, Whimsicalities and such stuff. Where's the ineffable mystery, The affiancing to affinities Of the young poet? The history Of an evolving mind's love For the miseries and the humanities? The sulking and son loving Muse Grabbed me when I was nine. She saw It was a question of self abuse Or verses. I tossed off reams before I cared to recognize their purpose. While other urchins were blowing up toads With pipes of straw stuck in the arse, So was I, but I also wrote odes. There was a priest, a priest, a priest, A Reverend of the Oratory Who taught me history. At least He taught me the best part of his story. Fat Father William, have you ceased To lead boys up the narrow path Through the doors of the Turkish Bath? I hope you're warm in Purgatory. And in the yard of the tenement - The Samuel Lewis Trust - I played While my father, for the rent (Ten bob a wekk and seldom paid) , Trudged London for a job. I went Skedaddling up the scanty years, My learning, like the rent, in arrears, But sometimes making the grade. Oh boring kids! In spite of Freud I find my childhood recollections Much duller now than when I enjoyed It. The whistling affections, All fitting wrong, toy railway sections Running in circles. Cruel as cats Even the lower beasts avoid These inhumanitarian brats. Since the Age of Reason's seven And most of one's friends over eight, Therefore they're reasonable? Even Sensible Stearns or simpleton Stephen Wouldn't claim that. I contemplate A world which, at crucial instants, Surrenders to adulterant infants The adult onus to think straight. At the bottom of this murky well My childhood, like a climbing root, Nursed in dirt the simple cell That pays itself this sour tribute. Track any poet to a beginning And in a dark room you will find A little boy intent on sinning With an etymological lover. I peopled my youth with the pulchritude Of heterae noun-anatomised; The literature that I prized Was anything to do with the nude Spirit of creative art Who whispered to me: 'Don't be queasy. Simply write about a tart And there she is. The rest's easy.' And thus, incepted in congenial Feebleness of moral power I became a poet. Venial As a human misdemeanour, Still, it gave me, prisoner In my lack of character, Pig to the Circean Muse's honour. Her honour? Why, it's lying on her. Dowered, invested and endowed With every frailty is the poet - Yielding to wickedness because How the hell else can he know it? The tempted poet must be allowed All ethical latitude. His small flaws Bring home to him, in sweet breaches, The moral self indulgence teaches. Where was I? Running, so to speak, To the adolescent seed? I Found my will power rather weak And my appetite rather greedy About the year of the General Strike, So I struck, as it were, myself: Refused to do anything whatsover, like Exercise books on a shelf. Do Youth and Innocence prevail Over that cloudcuckoo clime Where the seasons never fail And the clocks forget the time? Where the peaks of the sublime Crown every thought; where every vale Has its phantasy and phantasm And every midnight its orgasm? I mooned into my fourteenth year Through a world pronouncing harsh Judgments I could not quite hear About my verse, my young moustasche And my bad habits. In Battersea Park I almost heard strangers gossip About my poems, almost remark The bush of knowledge on my lip. Golden Calf, Golden Calf, where are you now Who lowed so mournfully in the dense Arcana of my adolescence? No later anguish of bull or cow Could ever be compared with half The misery of the amorous calf Moonstruck in moonshine. How could I know You can't couple Love with any sense? Poignant as a swallowed knife, Abstracted as a mannequin, Remote as music, touchy as skin, Apotheosising life Into an apocalypse, Young Love, taking Grief to wife, And tasting the bitterness of her lips Forgets it comes from swabbing gin. The veils descend. The unknown figure Is sheeted in the indecencies Of shame and boils. The nose gets bigger, The private parts, haired like a trigger, Cock at a dream. The infant cries Abandoned in its discarded larva, Out of which steps, with bloodshot eyes, The man, the man, crying Ave, Ave! 3 That Frenchman really had the trick Of figure skating in this stanza But I, thank God, cannot read Gallic And so escape his influenza. Above my head his rhetoric Asks emulation. I do not answer. It is as though I had not heard Because I cannot speak a word. But I invoke him, dirty dog, As one barker to another: Lift over me your clever leg, Teach me, you snail-swallowing frog To make out of a spot of bother Verses that shall catalogue Every exaggerated human claim, Every exaggerated human aim. I entreat you, frank villain, Get up out of your bed of dirt And guide my hand. You are still an Irreprehensible expert At telling Truth she's telling lies. Get up liar; get up, cheat, Look the bitch square in the eyes And you'll see what I entreat. We share, frog, much the same well. I sense your larger spectre down Here among the social swill Moving at ease beside my own And the muckrakers I have known. No, not the magnitude I claim That makes your shade loom like a tall Memorial but the type's the same. You murdered with a knife, but I Like someone out of Oscar Wilde Commemorate with a child The smiling victims as they die Slewing in kisses and the lie Of generation. But we both killed. I rob the grave you glorify, You glorify where I defiled. O most adult adulterer Preside, now, coldly over My writing hand, as to it crowd The images of those unreal years That, like a curtain, seem to stir Guiltily over what they cover - Those unreal years, dreamshot and proud, When the vision first appears. The unveiled vision of all things Walking towards us as we stand And giving us, in either hand, The knowledge that the world brings To those her most beloved, those Who, when she strikes with her wings, Stand rooted, turned into a rose By terrestrial understandings. Come, sulking woman, bare as water, Dazzle me now as you dazzled me When, blinded by your nudity, I saw the sex of the intellect, The idea of the beautiful. The beautiful to which I, later, Gave only mistrust and neglect, The idea no dishonour can annul. Vanquished aviatrix, descend Again, long vanished vision whom I have not known so long, assume Your former bright prerogative, Illuminate, guide and attend Me now. O living vision, give The grave, the verity; and send The spell that makes the poem live. I sent a letter to my love In an envelope of stone, And in between the letters ran A crying torrent that began To grow till it was bigger than Nyanza or the heart of man. I sent a letter to my love In an envelope of stone. I sent a present to my love In a black bordered box, A clock that beats a time of tears As the stricken midnight nears And my love weeps as she hears The armageddon of the years. I sent my love the present In a black bordered box. I sent a liar to my love With his hands full of roses But she shook her yellow and curled Curled and yellow hair and cried The rose is dead of all the world Since my only love has lied. I sent a liar to my love With roses in his hands. I sent a daughter to my love In a painted cradle. She took her up at her left breast And rocked her to a mothered rest Singing a song that what is best Loves and loves and forgets the rest. I sent a daughter to my love In a painted cradle. I sent a letter to my love On a sheet of stone. She looked down and as she read She shook her yellow hair and said Now he sleeps alone instead Of many a lie in many a bed. I sent a letter to my love On a sheet of stone. O long-haired virgin by my tree Among whose forks hung enraged A sexual passion not assuaged By you, its victim - knee to knee, Locked sweating in the muscled dark Lovers, as new as we were, spill The child on grass in Richmond Park. Crying the calf runs wild among Hills of the heart are memories: Long long the white kiss of the young Rides the lip and only dies When the whole man stalks among The crosses where remorse lies - Then, then the vultures on the tongue Rule empires of white memories. Legendary water, where, within Gazing, my own face I perceive, How can my self-disgust believe This was my angel at seventeeen? Stars, stars and the world, seen Untouched by crystal. Retrieve The morning star what culprit can Who knows his blood spins in between? Move backward, loving rover, over All those unfeathered instances I tar with kiss of pitch, the dirty Lip-service that a jaded thirty Renders its early innocences. Pointer of recollection, show The deaths in feather that now cover The tarry spot I died below. What sickening snot-engendered bastard Likes making an idiot of himself? I wish to heaven I had mastered The art of living like a dastard While still admiring oneself. About my doings, past and recent, I hear Disgust - my better half - 'His only decency's indecent.' Star-fingered shepherdess of Sleep Come, pacify regret, remorse; And let the suffering black sheep Weep on the bed it made. Let pause The orphic criminal to perceive That in the venue of his days All the crimes look back and grieve Over lies no grief allays. Sleep at my side again, my bride, As on our marriage bed you turned Into a flowering bush that burned All the proud flesh away. Beside Me now, you, shade of my departed Broken, abandoned bride, lie still, And I shall hold you close until Even our ghosts are broken hearted. So trusting, innocent, and unknowing What the hazards of the world Storm and strike a marriage with, We did not hear the grinders blowing But sailed our kisses round the world Ignorant of monsters and the vaster Cemetery of innocence. This wreath Dreams over our common disaster. But bright that nuptials to me now As when, the smiling foetus carried Rose-decked today instead of tomorrow, Like country cousins we were married By the pretty bullying embryo And you, my friend: I will not borrow Again the serge suit that I carried Through honey of moon to sup of sorrow. Loving the hand, gentle the reproving; Loving the heart, deeper the understanding; Deeper the understanding, larger the confiding For the hurt heart's hiding. Forgiving the hand, love without an ending Walks back on water; giving and taking Both sides become by simple comprehending: Deeper the love, greater the heart at breaking. 4 O Bishop Andrewes, Bishop Berkeley, John Peale Bishop and Bishop's Park, I look through my ego darkly But all that I perceive is dark: Episcopally illuminate My parochial testaments And with your vestal vested vestments Tenderly invest my state. Let grace, like lace, descend upon me And dignify my wingless shoulder: Let Grace, like space, lie heavy on me And make me seem a little older, A little nobler; let Grace sidle Into my shameful bed, and, curling About me in a psychic bridal, Prove that even Grace is a darling. The moon is graceful in the sky, The bird is graceful in the air, The girl is graceful too, so why The devil should I ever care Capitulating to despair? Since Grace is clearly everywhere And I am either here or there I'm pretty sure I've got my share. Grace whom no man ever held, Whose breast no human hand has pressed, Grace no lover has undressed Because she's naked as a beast - Grace will either gild or geld. Sweet Grace abounding into bed Jumps to it hot as a springald - After a brief prayer is said. Come to me, Grace, and I will take You close into my wicked hands, And when you come, make no mistake, I'll disgrace you at both ends. We'll grace all long throughout the night And as the morning star looks in And blanches at the state we're in - We'll grace again to be polite. For Marriage is a state of grace. So many mutual sacrifices Infallibly induce a peace Past understanding or high prices. So many forgivenesses for so many Double crossings or double dealings - I know that the married cannot have any But the most unselfish feelings. But the wise Church, contemplating The unnatural demands That marriage and the art of mating Make on egoists, commands We recognise as sacramental A union otherwise destined To break in every anarchic wind Broken by the temperamental. Off the Tarpeian, for high treason, Tied in a bag with a snake and a cock, The traitor trod the Roman rock. But in the bag, for a better reason, The married lovers, cock and snake, Lie on a Mount of Venus. Traitor Each to each, fake kissing fake, So punished by a betrayed creator. 'The willing union of two lives.' This is, the Lords of Justice tell us, The purpose of the connubial knot. But I can think of only one Function that at best contrives To join the jealous with the jealous, And what this function joins is not Lives, but the erogenous zone. I see the young bride move among The nine-month trophies of her pride, And though she is not really young And only virtually a bride, She knows her beauties now belong With every other treasure of her Past and future, to her lover: But her babies work out wrong. I see the bridegroom in his splendour Rolling like an unbridalled stallion, Handsome, powerful and tender, And passionate as an Italian - And nothing I could say would lend a Shock of more surprise and pride Than if I said that this rapscallion Was necking with his legal bride. I knew a beautiful courtesan Who, after service, would unbosom He prettier memories, like blossom, At the feet of the weary man: 'I'm such a sensitive protoplasm,' She whispered, when I was not there, 'That I experience an orgasm If I t o u c h a millionaire.' Lying with, about, upon, Everything and everyone, Every happy little wife Miscegenates once in alife, And every pardonable groom Needs, sometimes, a change of womb, Because, although damnation may be, Society needs every baby. It takes a sacrament to keep Any man and woman together: Birds of a forgivable feather Always flock and buck together: And in our forgivable sleep What birdwatcher will know whether God Almighty sees we keep Religiously to one another? I have often wondered what method Governed the heavenly mind when It made as audience to God The sycophant, the seaman sod, The solipsist - in short, men. Even the circus stepping mare Lifts her nose into the air In the presence of this paragon. For half a dozen simple years We lived happily, so to speak, On twenty-seven shillings a week; And, when worried and in tears, My mercenary wife complained That we could not afford our marriage, 'It's twice as much,' I explained, 'As MacNeice pays for his garage.' I entertained the Marxian whore - I am concerned with economics, And naturally felt that more Thought should be given to our stomachs. But when I let my fancy dwell On anything below the heart, I found my thoughts, and hands as well, Resting upon some private part. I sat one morning on the can That served us for a lavatory Composing some laudatory Verses on the state of man: My wife called from the kitchen dresser: 'There's someone here from Japan. He wants you out there. As Professor. Oh, yes. The War just began.' So Providence engineered her Circumstantial enigmas, And the crown of the objector Was snatched from me. In wars The conscientious protester Preserves, as worlds sink to force, The dignified particular. Particularly one, of course. 'The hackneyed rollcall of chronology' - Thus autobiography to de Quincey. And I can understand it, since he Lived like a footnote to philology. But the archangelic enumeration Of unpredictable hejiras - These, with a little exaggeration, I can adduce for my admirerers. And so, when I saw you, nightmare island, Fade into the autumnal night, I felt the tears rise up for my land, But somehow these tears were not quite As sick as when my belly laughed Remembering England had given me The unconditional liberty To do a job for which I starved. 5 Almighty God, by whose ill will I was created with a conscience; By whose merciful malevolence I shall be sustained until My afflictions fulfil His victories; by whose dispensation Whatever I have had of sense Has obfuscated my salvation - Good God, grant that, in reviewing My past life, I may remember Everything I did worth doing Seemed rather wicked in pursuing: Grant, Good God, I shall have remitted Those earthly pleasures beyond number I necessarily omitted, Exhausted by the ones committed. Good God, let me recollect Your many mercies, tall and short, The blousy blondes, the often necked, And those whom I should not have thought Given wisely to me; nor let forget My grateful memory the odd Consolers, too frequently brunette, Who charged me for your mercies, God. Good God, let me so recall My grave omissions and commissions That I may repent them all, - The places, faces and positions; Together with the few additions A feeble future may instal. Good God, only mathematicians Consider Love an ordinal. Good God, so wisely you provided The loving heart I suffer with, That I am constantly divided By a deep love for all beneath Me. Every man knows well He rides his own whores down to hell, But, good God, every knackered horse Was, originally, yours. Good God, receive my thanksgiving For all the wonders I have seen (And all the blunders in between) In my thirty odd years of living. I have seen the morning rise And I have seen the evening set - Anything different would surprise Me even more profoundly yet. Good God, receive my gratitude For favours undeserved: accept This truly heartfelt platitude: You gave me too much latitude And so I hanged myself. I kept Your mercy, Good God, in a box But out at midnight Justice crept And axed me with a paradox. O loving kindness of the knife That cuts the proud flesh from the rotten Ego and cuts the rotten life Out of the rotten bone! No, not an Ounce of sparrow is forgotten As that butchering surgeon cuts And rummages among my guts To succour what was misbegotten. I confess, my God, this lonely Derelict of a night, when I And not the conscious I only Feel all the responsibility - (But the simple and final fact That we are better than we act, For this fortunate windfall We are not responsible at all) - I confess, my God, that in The hotbed of the monkey sin I saw you through a guilt of hair Standing lonely as a mourner Silent in the bedroom corner Knowing you need not be there: I saw the genetic man had torn A face away from your despair. I confess, my God, my Good, I have not wholly understood The nature of our holiness: The striking snake errs even less Not questioning; the physicist Not asking why all things exist Serves better than those who advance a Question to which life's the answer. But, O my God, the human purpose If at all I can perceive A purpose in the life I live, Is to hide in the glass horse Of our doubt until the pity Of heaven opens up a city Of absolute belief to us, Because our silence is hideous And our doubt more miserable Than certainty of the worst would be. Like infinity pitiable Ghosts who do not even know They waver between reality And unreality, we go About our lives and cannot see Even why we suffer so. I know only that the heart Doubting every real thing else Does not doubt the voice that tells Us that we suffer. The hard part At the dead centre of the soul Is an age of frozen grief No vernal equinox of relief Can mitigate, and no love console. Then, O my God, by the hand This star-wandering grief takes The world that does not understand Its own miseries and mistakes And leads it home. Not yet, but later To lean an expiated head On the shoulder of a creator Who knows where all troubles lead. 6 I looked into my heart to write. In that red sepulchre of lies I saw that all man cherishes Goes proud, rots and perishes Till through that red room pitiless night Trails only knife-tongued memories To whose rags cling, shrieking, bright Unborn and aborted glories. And vinegar the mirages That, moaning they were possible Charge me with the unholy No. The unaccomplished issue rages Round the ringed heart like a bull Bellowing for birth. But even so Remorselessly the clock builds ages Over its lifeless embryo. Ruined empire of dissipated time, Perverted aim, abused desire, The monstrous amoeba cannot aspire But sinks down into the cold slime Of Eden as Ego. It is enough To sink back in the primal mud Of the first person. For what could Equal the paradise of Self Love? The necessary angel is The lie. Behind, us, all tongue splayed, The lie triumphant and tremendous Shields us from what we are afraid Of seeing when we turn - the Abyss Giving back a face of small Twisted fear - and this is all, To conquer the lie, that we possess. Come, corybantic self-delusion, And whisper such deceptions to Me now that I will not care who Or what you are, save palliation Of the question marked heart. Let rest The harp and horror horned head upon That green regenerative breast By whose great law we still live on. Now from my window looking down I see the lives of those for whom My love has still a little room Go suffering by. I see my own Stopped, like a stair carpet, at this story Not worth the telling. O memory Let the gilded images of joys known Return, and be consolatory! Bitter and broken as the morning Valentine climbs the glaciered sky With a spike in his foot. The lover's warning Blazes a sunrise on our misery: Look down, look down, and see our grey And loveless rendezvous, Valentine: Fold, then, in grief and cast away The love that is not yours or mine. Of this day of the innocent And happy lovers, let me praise The grotesque bestiary of those Who love too much. Monsters invent Monster, like babies gypsies raise In odd bottles for freak shows - Those love too deeply for the skin. Whose bottle are you monster in? The grotesque bestiary where Coiled the pythoness of sighs, To keep a beast within her there Crushes him in her clutch of vice Till, misshapen to her passion, dead, The lion of the heart survives By suffering kisses into knives And a spiked pit into a bed. Stand in your sad and golden haired Accusation about me now, My sweet seven misled into life. Oh had the hot headed seaman spared Those breast-baring ova on their bough, There'd been no aviary of my grief, No sweet seven standing up in sorrow Uttering songs of joy declared Of joy declared, as bird extol The principle of natural pleasure Not knowing why. Declare to all Who disbelieve it, that delight Naturally inhabits the soul. I look down at you to assure My sense of wrong: but you declare Whatever multiplies is right. I looked into my heart to write. But when I saw that cesspit twisted With the disgusting laws that live In royal domination under The surface of our love, that writhe Among our prizes, they attested The putrefaction of our love Spoils the spawner of its grandeur. 7 Today, the twenty-sixth of February, I, halfway to the minute through The only life I want to know, Intend to end this rather dreary Joke of an autobiography. Thirty-five years is quite enough Of one's own company. I grow A bit sick of the terrestial stuff. And the celestial nonsense. Swill Guzzle and copulate and guzzle And copulate and swill until You break up like a jigsaw puzzle Shattered with smiles. The idiotic Beatitude of the sow in summer Conceals a gibbering neurotic Sowing hot oats to get warmer. Look on your handwork, Adam, now As I on mine, and do not weep. The detritus is us. But how Could you and I ever hope to keep That glittering sibyl bright who first Confided in us, perfect, once, The difference between the best and the worst? That vision is our innocence. But we shall step into our grave Not utterly divested of The innocence our nativity Embodies a god in. O bear, Inheritors, all that you have, The sense of good, with much care Through the dirty street of life And the gutter of our indignity. I sense the trembling in my hand Of that which will not ever lower Its bright and pineal eye and wing To any irony, nor surrender The dominion of my understanding To that Apollyonic power Which, like the midnight whispering Sun, surrounds us with dark splendour. Enisled and visionary, mad Alive, in the catacomb of the heart, O lonely diviner, lovely diviner, impart The knowledge of the good and the bad To us in our need. Emblazon Our instincts upon your illumination So that the rot's revealed, and the reason Shown crucified upon our desolation. You, all whom I coldly took And hid my head and horns among, Shall go caterwauling down with me Like a frenzy of chained doves. For, look! We wailing ride down eternity Tongue-tied together. We belong To those with whom we shook the suck And dared an antichrist to be. Get rags, get rags, all angels, all Laws, all principles, all deities, Get rags, come down and suffocate The orphan in its flaming cradle, Snuff the game and the candle, for our state - Insufferable among mysteries - Makes the worms weep. Abate, abate Your justice. Execute us with mercies!