Bedouin of the London Evening

by Rosemary Tonks

  The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs

  And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,

  And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.

  …The drugged and battered Philistines

  Are all around you in the auditorium…

  And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,

  He wants to make me think his thoughts

  And they will be enormous, dull – (just the sort

  To keep away from).

  …when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking

  And he wants to face the international situation…

  Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

  – All this sitting about in cafés to calm down

  Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!

  The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

  I have lived it, and I know too much.

  My café-nerves are breaking me

  With black, exhausting information.

  The Sash Window

  Outside that house, I stood like a dog;

  The window was mysterious, with its big, dull pane

  Where the mud pastes are thrown by dark, alkaline skies

  That glide slowly along, keeping close to the ground.

  – But for the raging disgust which shook me

  So that my throat was scratched by her acid

  (Whose taste is the true Latin of culture) –

  I could have lived the life of these roads.

  That piece of filthy laurel moves up and down,

  And then the dead rose-leaves with their spat-on look

  Where the sour carbon lies…under

  The sash of the window comes the smell of stewing innards,

  With the freshly washed lavatory – I know where

  The old linoleum has its platinum wet patches

  And the disinfectant dries off in whiffs.

  Hellish, abominable house where I have been young!

  With your insane furnishings – above all

  The backs of dressing-tables where the dredged wood

  Faces the street, raw. And the window

  With its servant-maid’s mystery, which contains nothing,

  Where I bowed over the ruled-up music books

  With their vitreous pencilling, and the piano keys

  That touched water. How forlornly my strong, destructive head

  Eats again the reek of the sash window.

  Epoch of the Hotel Corridor

  I understand you, frightful epoch,

  With your jampots, brothels, paranoias,

  And your genius for fear, you can’t stop shuddering.

  Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.

  I know that to get through to you, my epoch,

  I must take a diamond and scratch

  On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message

  And my joy – sober, piercing, twilit.

  In the hotel where you live, my Kurdish epoch,

  Your opera of typewriters and taperecorders

  Boils the hotel with a sumptuous oompah!

  …(…as my heavy-drinking diamond writes)

  Boils it! And loosens the bread-grey crusts

  Of stucco from the 19th Century…with an opera

  Of broken, twilit poetry

  Built from your dust-drowned underworld of sighs.

  Epoch, we are lonely. For we follow hotel berbers

  Of the past, those who drift in corridors, whose tents

  And whose derisive manuscripts are dipped in marble

  By your backward glance.

  Badly-chosen Lover

  Criminal, you took a great piece of my life,

  And you took it under false pretences,

  That piece of time

  – In the clear muscles of my brain

  I have the lens and jug of it!

  Books, thoughts, meals, days, and houses,

  Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote,

  You took it – leaving mud and cabbage stumps.

  And, Criminal, I damn you for it (very softly).

  My spirit broke her fast on you. And, Turk,

  You fed her with the breath of your neck

  – In my brain’s clear retina

  I have the stolen love-behaviour.

  Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat,

  Gulped it, like a flunkey with erotica.

  And very softly, Criminal, I damn you for it.

  The Little Cardboard Suitcase

  Events pushed me into this corner;

  I live in a fixed routine,

  With my cardboard attaché case full of rotting books.

  …If only I could trust my blood! Those damn foreign women

  Have a lot to answer for, marrying into the family –

  – The mistakes, the wrong people, the half-baked ideas,

  And their beastly comments on everything. Foul.

  But irresistibly amusing, that is the whole trouble.

  With my cardboard suitcase full of occidental literature

  I reached this corner, to educate myself

  Against the sort of future they flung into my blood –

  The events, the people, the ideas – the ideas!

  And I alone know how disreputable and foreign.

  But as a thinker, as a professional water-cabbage,

  From my desk, of course, I shall dissolve events

  As if they were of no importance…none whatever.

  …And those women are to blame!

  I was already half-way into my disreputable future,

  When I found that they had thrown into my blood

  With the mistakes, the people, the ideas (ideas indeed!)

  This little cardboard suitcase…damned

  Beloved women…and these books, opium, beef, God.

  At my desk (lit by its intellectual cabbage-light)

  I found them – and they are irresistibly amusing –

  These thoughts that have been thrown into my blood.

  Hydromaniac

  I was leaning across your chest;

  Like a marble-smith, I made pencilmarks over

  Its vanilla skin, its young man’s skin,

  Refreshing as the pleasure page in a daily newspaper.

  I sniffed you to quench my thirst,

  As one sniffs in the sky huge, damp sheets of lightning

  That bring down the chablis, hocks, moselles,

  And tear cold, watery holes.

  Those soaking wet chords from Brahms (…their overflow,

  On which you could float a canoe)

  Are not more refreshing! Nor is the fragrant gin-fizz

  From the glass joint of a rod of grass.

  My life cries out for water!

  Haughty sheets of newsprint, lightning, music, skin!

  Haughty bathrooms where the lukewarm swimmer

  In his water-colour coat of soap is king.

  Students in Bertorelli’s

  Winter! We pour our politics into the brown walls,

  These little eating-houses run with grease like a meat chop.

  Each man stuffs himself with ideas, he eats his pork newspaper.

  With two or three cabbage banknotes you can listen to the fog-horn,

  The striking of the great clocks (how terrible), the alarm-bells, without fear.

  We are ready to slide away into the nearest gutter,

  Like old Paris hotels the fogs won’t leave in peace,

  In the souks where the young pair off, dog-tired and dirty,

  On a February evening…

  Nothing holds us upright but some cold green diction, banknotes, a penis.

  And they talk of Literature!

  But after all, give me again that new green diction.

  Oh yes, it’s atrocious. Certainly it’s literature.

  The Desert Wind Élite

  I am o
utside life, and pour the sand

  For my own desert, recklessly.

  But if some flame splashes over from my arab hours

  Into your dismal, shadow-bathing century…

  …And burns you, gutter-polished citizen,

  With my story – the drifting novocain of my horizon,

  My oases, and my mirages, they’re built of tears

  And sheets and sheets of grey glass like an onion,

  My story written in the sand! Laziness, despair,

  Worldly pressures, travelling, & dirty clothes, the need for sleep,

  Contempt for time – and more despair. Oh yes; I’m a writer

  Daring enough to make the sand my paper,

  It’s done by living, ignoramuses. Isn’t there always

  The unreliability, the cool mouth-bite of a beloved body?

  That’s the desert – where I hurry!…slowly, very slowly,

  Sometimes…almost stock-still in a sand-drift…hurrying.

  While dusty mobs pass, driven by the moon.

  …If it blasts you, modernists fobbed off

  With dingy souls, inside a century that growls

  For its carafe of shady air, oblivion, and psychiatric mash,

  Start Drinking! I shall seduce you. From my desk,

  The Soho of my drifting, yellowed sentences

  Calls out your name… Choked-up joy splashes over

  From this poem and you’re crammed, stuffed to the brim, at dusk,

  With hell’s casual and jam-green happiness!!

  Ah, pour yourself a desert, man-in-the-shadow-skin.

  This last minute enamel re-satanises Europe,

  And you will become my arab and my citizen.

  * * *

  I was walking in this shadow-bathing century

  Pouring sand for my own desert

  From my desolate high spirits…

  ……but recklessly, my arab and my citizen.

  An Old-fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes

  I was sitting upstairs in a bus, cursing the waste of time, and pouring my life away on one of those insane journeys across London – while gradually the wavering motion of this precarious glass salon, that flung us about softly like trusses of wheat or Judo Lords, began its medicinal work inside the magnetic landscape of London.

  The bus, with its transparent decks of people, trembled. And was as uniquely ceremonious in propelling itself as an eminent Jellyfish with an iron will, by expulsions, valves, hisses, steams, and emotional respirations. A militant, elementary, caparisoned Jellyfish, of the feminine sex, systematically eating and drinking the sea.

  I began to feel as battered as though I had been making love all night! My limbs distilled the same interesting wide-awake weariness.

  We went forward at a swimmer’s pace, gazing through the walls that rocked the weather about like a cloudy drink from a chemist’s shop – with the depth and sting of the Baltic. The air-shocks, the sulphur dioxides, the gelatin ignitions! We were all of us parcelled up in mud-coloured clothes, dreaming, while the rich perishable ensemble – as stuffy and exclusive as a bag of fish and chips, or as an Eskimo’s bed in a glass drift – cautiously advanced as though on an exercise from a naval college.

  The jogging was so consistently idiotic, it induced a feeling of complete security. I gave up my complicated life on the spot; and lay screwed up like an old handkerchief screwed up in a pocket, suspended in time, ready to go to the ends of the earth. O trans-Siberian railways! Balloons! Astronauts!

  The Ice-cream Boom Towns

  Hurry: we must go south to escape

  The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts,

  You, with your career, toad-winner, I with my intolerance.

  The English seacoast is more oafish than a ham.

  We can parade together softly, aloof

  Like envoys in coloured clothes – on the promenades,

  The stone sleeping-tables where the bourgeois bog down,

  And the brilliant sea swims vigorously in and out.

  There will be hot-house winds to blunt themselves

  Against the wooden bathing-huts, and fall down senseless;

  Lilos that swivel in the shallow, iced waves, half-submerged;

  Skiffs – trying to bite into a sea that’s watertight!

  One whiff of it – careerist – and we fall down senseless,

  Bivouacked! Your respirating, steep, electric head,

  Filled by its nervous breakdown, will slumber narcotised

  By the clear gas that trembles in the sandpit.

  Under the pier will be an overdose of shadows – the Atlantic

  Irrigates the girders with enormous, disembodied cantos,

  Unless you’re quick – they pull the clothes off your soul

  To make it moan some watery, half-rotten stanzas.

  Night! The plasterboard hotels that rattle shanty bedrooms

  On the front, are waiting! Without gods, books, sex or family,

  We’ll sink to a vast depth, and lie there, musing, interlocked

  Like deportees who undulate to phosphorescent booming.

  Addiction to an Old Mattress

  No, this is not my life, thank God…

  …worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;

  Obsessed first by one person, and then

  (Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;

  These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,

  They belong to the people in the streets, the others

  Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.

  Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!

  Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.

  Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd

  That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas

  That float themselves about from place to place, and then

  Spend hours – just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.

  Yalta: deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones.

  Meanwhile…I live on…powerful, disobedient,

  Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,

  With these people…who are going to obsess me,

  Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable

  For this is not my life

  But theirs, that I am living.

  And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.

  Song of the October Wind

  A mighty air-sea, fierce and very clean,

  Was gliding in across the city.

  Oxygenating gusts swept down and

  Chloroformed us, in a light too bright to see by.

  On pavements – china and milk pages

  In a good book, freshly iced by the printing press –

  October flash-floated. And you and I were moving

  With alert, sane, and possessive steps. At home,

  My sofa wrote her creaking, narcoleptic’s Iliad.

  My bathroom drank the Styx (bathwater

  Of the Underworld). My telephone took all its voices

  And gave them to the Furies, to practise with.

  While slowly – to gigantic, muddy blows of music

  From a pestle and mortar – roof, floor, walls, doors,

  My London, stuffed with whisky-dark hotels,

  Began to pant like a great ode!

  And threw, carelessly, into our veins

  Information – all the things we needed to know,

  For which there are no words, not even thoughts.

  And this was an ode shaken from a box of rats.

  The first sky from October’s aviary

  Of bone-dry, thudding skies, joyful, free, and young,

  With its wings lifted our souls, heavy as cities,

  Effortlessly. We were trustworthy again.

  Ritz, Savoy, Claridge’s, hotels full of peacock words,

  Were beaten white by Boreas; and as

  Electric frosts scratched the windows

  Fittin
g in their awkward childish pane of glowing stone,

  We – copied the foaming with our souls!

  The same ode tore the streets inside us. And lit

  Catwalks, sofas, taxis in that city with a light

  So bright, even the blind could see by it.

  Done for!

  Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one,

  For if you mix with the wrong people

  – And you yourself may be one of the wrong people –

  If you make love to the wrong person,

  In some old building with its fabric of dirt,

  As clouds of witchcraft, nitro-glycerine, and cake,

  Brush by (one autumn night) still green

  From our green sunsets…and then let hundreds pass, unlit,

  They will do you ferocious, indelible harm!

  Far beyond anything you can imagine, jazzy sneering one,

  And afterwards you’ll live in no man’s land,

  You’ll lose your identity, and never get yourself back, diablotin,

  It may have happened already, and as you read this…

  Ah, it has happened already. I remember, in an old building;

  Clouds which had cut themselves on a sharp winter sunset

  (With its smoking stove of frosts to keep it cold) went by, bleeding.

  Orpheus in Soho

  His search is desperate!

  And the little night-shops of the Underworld