Free Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks

grandeur,
    Depth, and crust is stacked around me – that I am.

Farewell to Kurdistan
    As my new life begins, I start smiling at the people around me,
    You would think I’d just been given a substantial meal,
    I see all their good points.
    The railway sheds are full of greenish-yellow electricity,
    It’s the great midday hour in London…that suddenly goes brown.
    …My stupefying efforts to make money
    And to have a life!
    Well, I’m leaving; nothing can hold me.
    The platforms are dense to the foot,
    Rich, strong-willed travellers pace about in the dark daylight,
    And how they stink of green fatty soaps, the rich.
    More dirty weather…you can hardly see the newspaper stand
    With its abominable, ludicrous papers…which are so touching
    I ought to laugh and cry, instead of gritting my teeth.
    Let me inhale the filthy air for the last time,
    Good heavens, how vile it is.… I could take you step by step
    Back among the twilight buildings, into my old life…
    The trains come in, boiling, caked!
    The station half tames them, there’s the sound of blows; the uproar!
    And I – I behave as though I’ve been starved of noise,
    My intestine eats up this big music
    And my new bourgeois soul promptly bursts into flames, in mid-air.
    No use pouring me a few last minutes of the old life
    From your tank of shadow, filled with lost and rotten people,
    I admit: the same flow of gutter-sugar to the brain…
    I admit it, London.
    No one to see me off – Ah!
    I would like to be seen off; it must be the same agonising woman
    Who does not want to understand me, and who exposes me in public,
    So that I can turn away, choked with cold bile,
    And feel myself loved absolutely; the bitch.
    These carriages, that have the heavy brown and black bread
    Up their sides! But look out for the moment of cowardice,
    It’s Charon’s rowing-boat that lurches and fouls my hand
    As I climb on – exile, Limboist.
    …The way these people get on with their lives; I bow down
    With my few deeds and my lotus-scars.
    Last minutes…last greenish-yellow minutes
    Of the lost and rotten hours…faro, and old winters dimmed,
    On which the dark – Yes, the black sugar-crust is forming, London.
    I’m leaving! Nothing can hold me!
    The trains, watered and greased, scream to be off.
    Hullo – I’m already sticking out my elbows for a piece of territory,
    I occupy my place as though I can’t get enough of it
    – And with what casual, haughty, and specific gestures, incidentally.
    Tradesmen, Pigs, regenerative trains – I shall be saved!
    I shall go to the centre of Europe; gliding,
    As children skate on the diamond lid of the lake
    Never touching ground – Xenophile, on the blue-plated meadows.
    Oh I shall live off myself, rainclothes, documents,
    The great train simmers.… Life is large, large!
    …I shall live off your loaf of shadows, London;
    I admit it, at the last.

Black Kief and the Intellectual
    I shall fill up that pit inside me
    With my gloomiest thoughts; and then
    Spread myself, prostrate, inert, on top of them.
    Ah, miserable at last! Felicity.
    Those who drink the sea with its fishy breath
    Cannot know with what dread I gorge to death
    On ideologies – bitter dogma, dialectic, creed;
    H.P. sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, chutney,
    Filthy kitchen work that swindles, that says ‘feed’,
    Dried-up certitude, monkish inhibition, duty,
    That helps us to fall downhill, mad as swine.
    There, alone, I see my obligation. But let me begin
    By describing my tiredness…a word on my depression.

The Drinkers of Coffee
    We talk openly, and exchange souls.
    Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!
    The same double life among the bores and vegetables,
    By lamplight in the coffee-houses you have sat it out
    Half toad, half Sultan, of the rubbish-heap,
    You know the deadly dull excitement; the champagne sleet
    Of living; you know all the kitchen details of my ego’s thinking,
    When, with our imaginations shuddering,
    We move arrogantly into one