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suit of arrows
    For here my evil, blue, and moody youth
    Has found its old lair…at the bottom
    Of the soil path in the bed of stinging nettles
    That are splashed with wood milk
    And have every hair upon them raised to strike!
    There is no trade can lure me out with bundle,
    Noose, and feeding-bag; I know that fate
    Has graves to fill in daily life,
    And the jargon of the meat-fly’s leaded wing
    To put to sleep the citizen
    Employed in keeping worms at bay by breathing.

Bedroom in an Old City
    In the room with the water mark as rich as sago on the wall, the young head of a minx asleep sheds on cheap linen the pale silk hair of baby Kensington.
    An apricot fabric, hanging in wads lightly grimed, admits morning. The furnishings have picked themselves clothing as country bushes with hooks are able to dress from passing children. A tumbler of green beach glass with some spillings, bright water ovals firm on dust, is the bedside comfort.
    Against hair and sheet the mesmerised face is very slightly active. Paint burns from yesterday’s gouache are healing on the mouth; it passes some great supernatural illness with the zither of a little healthy breath. The shorthand typist at seventeen: on either side of warm nostril she presses crossly to her cheek the stiff gilt lashes of a court page.
    In the underframe of the window, beading records a lorry from the world; buzz of a giant ’cello string. A chest of drawers take the itch of the infection.
    Streets have begun.
    A lapel dog with goblet eyes of hot seccotine stamps on brass toes to where a black tree eats gravel; the snout at the urinal shiny as the chinpad of a violin. Labourers, their ringlets scented with blue grease, assemble at some work of coloured mud. A tradesman with the specific violence and well-being of butchers steps out for his attractive marble shop of quartered bodies; glazed cheeks of the very best meat, these have been costly feeders since he was a young soldier handsome as a tulip and badly finished at the hands.
    In the distance, weather can be seen thrusting and gleaming. A diamond cutter has been over the metropolis. The atmosphere has spat once or twice on fish and magazines.
    A sharp piece of blond sugar rattles in the mouth of a newsboy; he lubricates and passes with a humid bag of language. Infant snob, he adjusts precociously his printed jargon sheets to door and nameplate. With its ingenious crimes, the civilisation is comprehensive; it is not necessary to take the rest of the world seriously. But in order that they may be said to think deeply, people go to the trouble of believing their opinions even when they are alone.
    And when she wakes, this London minx of seventeen, the whole city, the whole Imperial rubbish heap of wastrels, scullions, houris, fauns, and bedouin, will look to this pillow where a life so young, secret, and clean opens its eyes that it puts Mortality in doubt – for possibly forty seconds.

The Flâneur and the Apocalypse
    For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe
    With its great streets full of air and shade,
    Its students and cocottes,
    And traffic, roughly caked with blood,
    Is not enough. The whole of Europe put to sleep
    By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,
    And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,
    And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,
    Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.
    A Europe…motionless with dust and night,
    As if a squid her bag had emptied,
    As if a doormat had been shaken over it,
    Is not mysterious enough for his infatuated tread!
    The Furies are modern, they don’t drive you they entice
    With cafés, lovers, dusty streets…with the Apocalypse
    â€˜Not this one – but the
next
,’ they hiss.

Fear’s Blindworm
    Fear is the blindworm in the brain,
    In souls that keep house with a dagger
    And love the cabbage-shade,
    Hell’s brainworm gnaws the harder.
    When God unpurses all the grudges
    Of the Universe on lives propped up on crutches
    Like a