  How many planets have you raped, Where only animals escaped To scrape with melancholy needs The bones of last men lost in weeds? Since you are blunt and fraudulent You must receive a bare treatment. Adverbs and adjectives undress When greeted by excrescences. You are the stench on any street, Thick with the vagaries of defeat: The wench who plies her squawking crime Within the alley-ways of time. For men desire to guard with pain The limitations of their brain, And drag the numbness of their hearts Within ornate and creaking carts. And for these tasks they must be bold, Clutching endurance from a cold Squirming with you within the dark, And rising blistered with your mark. Again you give to doubting lust An argument which it can trust. Imagination spoils the scene And needs a dagger, crude and mean. For you were made by men to choke A lyric with an obscene joke And strike the mind when it is strong, With whips methodical and long. Men who are inarticulate Desire to parody their fate With gibberish of clinking coins. When life, excited thief, purloins They lead him to a mouldy pen: They seek revenge and watch him wilt, Finding importance in his guilt. They do not know that they have made The thief to revel in his aid. And you are there to strain your cheek Against imaginations weak— Coquettish counterfeit of strength. I have observed your metal length Of hands drop on the poet’s throat, And yet he scarcely saw you gloat. To certain men you merely feed The stoics of creative need. Money I am the vicious test with which Men find that they are poor or rich. Without my challenge men might fail To leave the blurred and murderous jail. Utopias are merely death: Men need the scorching of my breath. |
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