Metempsychosis

SUDDENLY to become John Benbow, walking down William Street With a tin trunk and a five-pound note, looking for a place to eat, And a peajacket the colour of a shark's behind That a Jew might buy in the morning. . . . To fry potatoes (God save us!) if you feel inclined, Or to kiss the landlady's daughter, and no one mind, In a peel-papered bedroom with a whistling jet And a picture of the Holy Virgin. . . . Wake in a shaggy bale of blankets with a fished-up cigarette, Picking over the 'Turfbird's Tattle' for a Saturday morning bet, With a bottle in the wardrobe easy to reach And a blast of onions from the landing. . . . Tattooed with foreign ladies' tokens, a heart and dagger each, In places that make the delicate female inquirer screech, And over a chest smoky with gunpowder-blue— Behold!—a mermaid piping through a coach-horn! Banjo-playing, firing off guns, and other momentous things to do, Such as blowing through peashooters at hawkers to improve the view— Suddenly paid-off and forgotten in Woolloomooloo. . . . Suddenly to become John Benbow. . . .