A Cloud In Trousers – epilogue

Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart’s bloody tatters I’ll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I’ll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I’m devoid,
there’s not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by — handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

Gentle ones!
You lay your love on a violin.
The crude lay their love on a drum.
but you can’t, like me, turn inside out entirely,
and nothing but human lips become!

Out of chintz-covered drawing-rooms, come
and learn-
decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues.

and you whose lips are calmly thumbed,
as a cook turns over cookery-book leaves.

If you like-
I’ll be furiously flesh elemental,
or – changing to tones that the sunset arouses –
if you like-
I’ll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man, but – a cloud in trousers!