In the beginning was the word, the word That from the solid bases of the light Abstracted all the letters of the void.
This bread I break was once the oat, This wine upon a foreign tree Plunged in its fruit; Man in the day or wind at night Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.
The function of posterity is to look after itself.
A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug's a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?
And time cast forth my mortal creature To drift or drown upon the seas Acquainted with the salt adventure Of tides that never touch the shores. - I who was rich was made the richer By sipping at the the vine of days.
When logics die, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.
Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.
But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.
Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You're looking up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?
Seventeen whiskeys. A record, I think.
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?
I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.
And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain.
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
All world was one, one windy nothing, My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!
Love drips & gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores..." -Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.
This world is half the devil's and my own, Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.
I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.
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