Collected Poems by Anthony Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) 📕

loathed

Nude apes up there: let us at least be clothed,

Attack from knowledge and not just from rage:

Reject from reason. In another age,

Your fathers spoke thus, and did not the grey

Poet on Paumanok cry out: Obey

Little; resist much – let those four words be

A lasting slogan for the polity?

Love man the social animal, but hate,

On principle, the engine called the State;

Burn out the evil centre, and resolve

To flaunt a banner blazoned with Devolve,

Devolve. Then, last, remember Maynard Keynes:

People alone have virtue in their veins;

All governments are evil. This he knew.

Comparatively, things go well for you,

America. I know – smog makes you cough,

Too many citizens are badly off

(Meaning, by Asian standards, millionaires),

The story of West 77th Street scares

The living daylights out of us – but still

Shocked citizens attempt to work their will

(Devolve, devolve) despite the apathy.

Your dreams, like ours, revolve on bankruptcy,

Moral or fiscal, both, inflation and

Entropy. Here, in Italy’s sad land

(Gorgeous December sheens Bracciano’s lake,

Clear as a bell beyond, my tired eyes take

Soracte in, that Horace used to know,

All candidly nival, tipped with snow),

Bankruptcy sits beside us, walks the streets,

Takes coffee in the café, chats and eats,

A trusted friend, which never lets you down.

Bankruptcy blows and petrifies the town,

Shuts the museums, spares the mailman’s boots,

Blanks out the teevoo, clears the roads, recruits

Spray-gunning thugs who scrawl Death on the plinths,

Chokes up the bureaucratic labyrinths,

Hides oil and salt, makes impotent the laws,

But places truncheons in the policeman’s paws.

Inflation? Ah, we beat all records here –

A 20 (minimal) % per year.

England, my country, mother of the free,

Is crammed with paper money too. You’ll see

Financial columns crammed with reasons why:

The petromoney of the sheiks, the sly

Printing of empty paper by the State,

The blackmail of the unions, some great

Cryptoconspiracy all bloody red

That loves to strike and, striking, strikes us dead.

So England shivers, and the coal’s undug,

Darkness abets the murder and the mug,

And light and heat assume definitive

Value – i.e., more than one has to give.

‘The oil is Allah’s,’ yodels the bilal,

‘Therefore the Peoples of the Scriptures shall

Learn who the Chosen People really are.’

So freezing people on a cooling star

Envy the Indians, who rarely freeze

But die instead from other maladies.

We’re all in this – you there and we back here –

Seeing fresh millions added every year

To swell the hordes of those ordained to starve.

The rich man has a juicy joint to carve,

But no joint’s big enough to palliate

The hunger of the hundreds at the gate.

Hinc illae lacrimae. A single penny

Is indivisible among the many,

So is a dime, a quarter, dollar – hence

We justify our modest affluence.

Courage! Though life is feeble, life persists

(Persists? Increases, cry the pessimists).

The Orinoco cannibal affirms:

Better for friends to eat you than the worms.

As you believe that men have reached the moon,

Believe that anthropophagy will soon

Solve all our problems, justifying war,

Since here’s a noble cause to wage it for.

The fighting young, the flower of every land,

Will fall in battle and will then be canned.

Try this, the supermarkets will proclaim:

Munch MANCH or MONCH or MENSCH, or some such name.

Meanwhile, although the demonstrator cries:

‘Each time you laugh, another Indian dies’;

Let’s greet old two-faced Janus with dry eyes.

‘Whatever the year brings, it brings nothing new,’

Wrote Rose Macauley. True – it was always true.

Walk on the sidewalk’s edge, avoid the dark,

Watch out for pederasts in Central Park,

Read Plato and not Playboy, cease to try

To see life as a thing to quantify,

Cherish the gunman, guardian of the door,

And you’ll come through. You came through ’74.

PERSONAL VERSE, VIGNETTES, AND OTHER SHORT WORKS

A SONNET FOR THE EMERY COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE

Temerity – to launch into a sonnet

All unforeknowing what it will contain,

Or whether it will rhyme – whether, again,

Enough rhymes are available – not bonnet.

Upon it (they’ve been used before). I con it

(Five lines complete already) with less pain

Than I anticipated. Don’t disdain

The rhyme that’s coming. Is it? Yes. Doggone it.

Whatever that may mean. Advice: don’t read

A Clockwork Orange – it’s a foul farrago

Of made-up words that bite and bash and bleed.

I’ve written better books beside this lago

Bracciano. So have other men, indeed.

Read Hamlet, Shelley, Keats, Doctor Zhivago.

‘ADVICE TO WOULD-BE WRITERS? SIMPLE. DON’T’

Advice to would-be writers? Simple. Don’t.

Any profession’s preferable to this.

Exhilarating, true, the Muse’s kiss,

But inspiration’s accolades just won’t

Pay rent, buy groceries. To grieve, to groan, t-

-o search for the mot juste, to aim, to miss

The scene or image sought, to brave the hiss

Of critics, feel in bowel, brain and bone t-

-orment and terror – this, my friend, is writing.

Then add to all the public’s crass neglect,

And fellow-authors’ sneering and backbiting.

This, and much more, the tyro must expect.

To launch a book, you’d think, would be exciting –

But ship and builder are too quickly wrecked.

Neglect and poverty have rocks in wait to wreck us.

Writers in general are a wretched sect.

‘I SEND THESE LINES TO YOU IN AGINCOURT’

I send these lines to you in Agincourt

(The right place for Bucannon) and regret

I cannot send a photograph. Any yet

Why should I sell myself so beastly short,

Bestowing transience – the porcine snort

And not the porcine esculence? To let

My ugliness, irrelevant, beget

My lasting image? – No, I’m not that sort.

A man is what he does, not how he seems,

And what he does is what he bids survive.

The voice that booms, the radiant eye that beams

Are nothing – not the honey but the hive.

Faces are things one shudders at in dreams:

The work is what attests the man alive.

THE LAST DAY (TO THE EDITORS, YALE NEWS)

End of the world – cosy, something thrilling

Read in a boy’s book, heard on the radio:

Wells or Welles, apocalyptico-

Cathartic, buildings crashings, voices shrilling,

And me outside the frame, clutching the shilling

Shocker, in an incandescent glow,

Knowing this the ultimate frisson: below

The cindered earth, me saved somehow, God willing.

It will not be that way: no Gabriel’s horn

Over the snarled traffic. A whimper, rather,

Long-drawn and boring. Ravaged earth, forlorn

With crops parched, seas a polluted lather.

A man says: This is the end, for days. But never

Sure. The end could linger for ever.

LATE AS I AM, BUT BLAME THE MAILS, NOT ME (TO MR SELWYN C. GAMBLE)

Late as I am,