This world is half the devil’s and my own, Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.
To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.
A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug’s a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?
Rage, rage against the dying light.
In the beginning was the secret brain. The brain was celled and soldered in the thought.
If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.
You just wait. I’ll sin ’til I blow up!
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.
When logics die, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain...
I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.
This bread I break was once the oat, This wine upon a foreign tree Plunged in its fruit; Man in the day or wind at night Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.
Seventeen whiskeys. A record, I think.
A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.
After the first death, there is no other.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?
And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.