Poetry

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pin-point nucleus of being Locate an irritation without It is within Within It is without. The sensitized area Is identical with the extensity Of intension

I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait-painter Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or⁠—” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception Brute Why? The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running up-stairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night-hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a

Though you had never possessed me I had belonged to you since the beginning of time And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you Leaning against your shoulder And your careless arm across my back gesticulated As your indisputable male voice roared Through my brain and my body Arguing dynamic decomposition Of which I was understanding nothing Sleepily And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect Boomed as it seemed to me so sleepy Across an interval of a thousand miles An interim of a thousand years But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you clear your throat Deafening woke me And I caught the thread of the argument Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude And ceased to be a woman

Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman The animal woman Understanding nothing of man But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children Or the thunder of alien gods But you woke me up Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity

“Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.”

Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots Latin Borghese

Houses hold virgins The door’s on the chain

“Plumb streets with hearts” “Bore curtains with eyes”

Virgins without dots Stare beyond probability

See the men pass Their hats are not ours We take a walk They are going somewhere And they may look everywhere Men’s eyes look into things Our eyes look out

A great deal of ourselves We offer to the mirror Something less to the confessional The rest to Time There is so much Time Everything is full of it Such a long time

Virgins may whisper “Transparent nightdresses made all of lace” Virgins may squeak “My dear I should faint!” Flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… .⁠ ⁠… “And then the man⁠—” Wasting our giggles For we have no dots

The threewomen who all walked In the same dress And it had falling ferns on it Skipped parallel To the progress Of Giovanni Franchi

Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked Flickeringly as he flacked them His wrists explained things Infectiously by way of his adolescence His adolescence was all there was of him Whatever was left was rather awkward His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees Descended to the fallacious nobility Of his first pair of trousers

They were tubular flapped friezily The colour of coppered mustard What matter Were they not the first No others could ever be the first again The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen Began fading as she thought of it Tea-table problems for insane asylums Are démodé Démodé

Allow us to rely on our instincts

The threewomen was composed of three instincts Each sniffing divergently directed draughts The first instinct first again may renascent gods save us from the enigmatic penetralia of Firstness Was to be faithful to a man first The second to be loyal to herself first She would have to find which self first The third which might as well have been first Was to find out how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had first

Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born You imagine what he looked like Looked it as nearly as he could as the philosopher looked His articulations were excellent Still where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous Giovanni Franchi was merely pale

The Effectual Marriage Or, The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni

The door was an absurd thing Yet it was passable They quotidienly passed through it It was this shape

Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows They knew it was important to them This being of who they were They were themselves Corporeally transcendentally consecutively conjunctively and they were quite complete

In the evening they looked out of their two windows Miovanni out of his library window Gina from the kitchen window From among his pots and pans Where he so kindly kept her Where she so wisely busied herself Pots and Pans she cooked in them All sorts of sialagogues Some say that happy women are immaterial

So here we might dispense with her Gina being a female But she was more than that Being an incipience a correlative an instigation of the reaction of man From the palpable to the transcendent Mollescent irritant of his fantasy Gina had her use Being useful contentedly conscious She flowered in Empyrean From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays a warm light in the parlor From the gritty road on the white wall anybody could see it Shimmered a composite effigy Madonna crinolined a man hidden beneath her hoop Ho for the blue and red of her The silent eyelids of her The shiny smile of her