A Cloud In Trousers - Part Iii

Ah, wherefrom this, how explain this brandishing of dirty fists at bright joy! She came, and thoughts of a madhouse curtained my head in despair. And as a dreadnought founders and men in choking spasms dive out of an open hatch so Burlyuk, panic-stricken, crawled though the screaming gash of his eye. Almost bloodying his teary eyelids, he crawled out, rose, walked, and, with tenderness unexpected in one so obese, announced: 'It's fine!' It's fine, when a yellow shirt shields the soul from investigation! It's fine, when thrown at the gibbet's teeth, to shout: 'Drink Van Houten's Cocoa!' That instant crackling like a Bengal light, I would not exchange for anything, not for any ¡­ Out of the cigar smoke, Severyanin's drink-sodden face lurched forward like a liqueur glass. How dare you call yourself a poet, and twitter greyly like a quail! This day brass knuckles must split the world inside the skull! You, who are supremely worried by the thought: 'Am I an elegant dancer?' Look at my way of enjoying life I a common pimp and cardsharp! On you, steeped in love who watered the centuries with tears, I'll turn my back, fixing the sun like a monocle into my gaping eye. Donning fantastic finery, I'll strut the earth to please and scorch; and Napoleon will precede me, like a pug, on a leash. The earth, like a woman, will flop on her back, a mass of quivering flesh, ready to yield; things will come to life and their lips will lisp and lisp: 'Yum-yum-yum!' Suddenly, the clouds and other cloudy things in the sky will roll and pitch madly as if workers in white when their way after declaring a bitter strike against the sky. More savagely, thunder strode from a cloud, friskily snorting from enormous nostrils; and, for a second, the sky's face was twisted in the Iron Chancellor's grim grimace. And someone, entangled in a cloudy mesh. held out his hands to a caf'; and it looked somehow feminine, and tender somehow, and somehow like a gun carriage. You believe the sun was tenderly patting the cheeks of the caf'? No, it's General Gallifet, advancing again to mow down the rebels! Strollers, hands from your pockets pick a stone, knife, or bomb; and if any of you have no arms, come and fight with your forehead! Forward, famished ones, sweating ones, servile ones, mildewed in the flea-ridden dirt! Forward! Painting Mondays and Tuesdays in blood, we shall turn them into holidays. Let the earth at knife's point, remember whom it wished to debase! The earth, bulging like a mistress whom Rothchild has overfondled! The flags may flutter in a fever of gunfire as on every important holiday will you, the street lamps, hoist high up the battered carcasses of traders. I swore, pleaded, stabbed, fought to fasten my teeth into somebody's flesh, In the sky, red as Marseillaise, the sunset shuddered at its last gasp. It's madness. Nothing at all will remain. Night will arrive, bite in two, gobble you up. Look is the sky playing Judas again with a handful of treachery-spattered stars? Night came. Feasted like Mamai, squatting with its rump on the city. Our eyes cannot break this night, black as Azef! I huddle, slumped in corners of saloons; with vodka drenching my soul and the cloth, I notice in one corner rounded eyes: the madonna's, which bite into the heart. Why bestow such radiance of the painted form upon a horde infesting a saloon! Don't you see! They spit on the man of Golgotha again, preferring Barabbaas. Deliberately, perhaps, I show no newer face amid this human mash. I, perhaps, am the handsomest of your sons. Give them, who are mouldy with joy, a time of quick death, that children may grow, boys into fathers, girls big with child. And may new born babes grow the hair of the magi and they will come anon to baptise the infants with the names of my poems. I, who praised the machine and England, I am perhaps quite simply the thirteenth apostle in an ordinary gospel. And whenever my voice rumbles bawdily then, from hour to hour, around the clock, Jesus Christ may be sniffing the forget-me-nots of my soul.