Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

wet feet and limp wet shirt

And earwax in my oxters, and brain that was only surprised

Out of its boredom by each radio chime

Showing it was earlier than I’d thought it could possibly be.

But time, as we know, must in time get the better of time,

So time came for slurred and claudicant me

To know I might be late, and, as the lights came on all down the river,

Brandish that snugly latent sword at the cabs with lights

Until Jack Greenbaum contracted to deliver

The sclerosis and the cane and the gin of Brooklyn Heights

And, somewhere inside, me, not claudicant but palpitant now.

Hundredth-and-tenth Street, the pay-off, the elevator,

Her door, she, in in quick, with ‘I can’t allow,

I can’t really, it won’t do, you know it won’t do’. And she: ‘Later:

Time for that later. Be calm, be calm.’ But I’d gotten into the way

Of thrusting that hidden steel, and I thrust, to protect her youth,

To protect me from her youth. She grasped, and it came away,

Sweetly, the cherrywood, and there, like attenuated truth,

The sword flashed. I said: ‘It’s only to lean on, to strengthen the cane.’

‘Yes’, she said, ‘yes’. It flashed, strong and straight. ‘Well’, she said,

And she felt the edge, the point. I tried to sheathe it again,

But she said: ‘Lay it there on the bed,

In the middle.’ So there it lay,

Virtue’s protector in the old courting custom. Still, it flashed. I washed off the day

And middleage. Clean and hungry, I breathed

More calmly now, and while she brought food, I looked at it unsheathed,

At least it was unsheathed, at last it was unsheathed.

O LORD, O FORD, GOD HELP US, ALSO YOU

A New Year’s Message for 1975

Unhouse that calendar: her dates are done,

Her whorings over. Get another one,

Try to pretend that a new year has begun,

The diary, blank, apes sinlessness. This is

The most pathetic of all fallacies –

The springs-eternal hope of a ‘fresh start’

In the core of winter of, down under, heart

Of summer (the same season, after all:

Both lack the sharp élan of spring or fall,

So very and oppressively much here).

The church is realistic: its new year

Does not begin until Easter. New Year’s Day

Is part of Christmas time, roughly halfway,

Marked by the Circumcision – snip and bless

And bow half-heartedly to cleanliness.

But we, who groan from drink or, showering, sing,

Believe the first of January can bring

Regeneration magically about

Both in our psyches and the world without.

On Jan 6, 10 – in other words, a bit

Later, we will, we vow, get down to it.

Nonsense – it can’t be done: that’s definite.

Spring brings the true new, nature’s statements are

Simple enough: all the change is circular.

The firm ascending straight progressive line

Is dream geography, that’s all. In fine,

This Nineteen-Seventy-five will see us still

Churning in Seventy-four’s Satanic Mill.

Has any twelvemonth fed us more with fear?

Was ever a more salutary year?

At least we’re learning and no more pretend

That history moves to a Hegelian end.

Utopia spells Erewhon, the earth’s

Resources are not infinite, a birth’s

Another burden in a hungry world,

Man’s gobbed up the soil and also hurled

His poisons in the water and the air,

Hell is a fact and no mere Sunday scare,

America as Eden’s dead and gone,

The Devil rides, and so on and so on.

Men we thought big are now revealed as little,

Conniving and contriving, mean and brittle,

Power-hungry merely, greedier than us,

Vindictive, vulgarians, and ugly too

(Truth’s beauty, and the antithesis is true).

I gawped at New York television while

Your Ford, unflawed by an ironic smile,

Announced to the whole world: Truth is a glue.

O Lord, O Ford, God help us, also you.

Half a millennium has gone by since

Great Niccolò penned precepts for a Prince.

But in those unregenerate days at least

A prince, however hard he played the beast,

Saw statues hovering over him and read

Plato and Aristotle: the huge dead

Were still alive. But now, alas, it looks

As if the drughead’s Nothin’, man, in books

Infects the castles where our rulers sit

(History, that other Ford once said, is sh—t).

The men that British rotten boroughs sent

To hector in a venal Parliament

Fulfilled no democratic precepts, yet

Saw that their own mean times were soundly set

In an unfolding swathe of destiny;

Man was, and had been, and would always be

What Homer, Seneca, Thucydides,

Xenophon, Cicero, and more like these

Had limned. They saw their legislative task

As somehow philosophical, would ask,

As Jefferson and Lincoln once did, the one

Sound question: What is man, what must be done

By government, man’s servant, to fulfil

The deeper longings of his higher will?

For politics was metaphysics, art,

Eloquence, knowledge of the human heart,

That is now sunk into a disrepute

Shameful and shameless, all too absolute.

This year will pose the question once again:

Where shall we go to seek superior men?

Superior in what? – a voice asks then:

The answer: In no more than being men.

The great technician’s no superior man –

Only a larger type of artesan,

Extensive of his system or machine.

We need philosophers, not men who’ve been

Exalted through their skill at shyster’s tricks

Who shell out shibboleths, who fox, who fix,

Committed to the timocratic view

That wealth is power, and neither is for you.

Add wealth and power to vulgar ignorance,

And you can tune up for our Totentanz.

The worship of the base is here to stay:

I heard a British union leader say:

‘They brought the plain men where they are today,

The great men: let them sleep, their task is done.’

Exactly. Let your son, and your son’s son,

Inherit demo-ethics, demo-art,

And learn this demo-decalogue by heart;

First, order your instructors what to teach,

Since a man’s grasp must not exceed his reach:

Spit on the higher values when you can,

Unsanctified by democratic man;

Permit free speech, though, since it can’t effect

A blasting of the walls of the elect:

To slay – what is it but to put to sleep?

Computers cost much, human souls are cheap.

Lie all you wish, for who knows what truth is?

Play games among the ruined languages,

Jettison why and concentrate on how;

Assign a prime reality to now;

Deny responsibility for then;

Consume and damn posterity – amen.

To opt out of this midden into dreams –

Communes or opiates – to many seems

The desperate one solution. I say: turn

Once more to the necessity to learn,

Not make a tabula rasa of your head,

But cram it with philosophy instead;

Leave inarticulacy to the