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

but blame the mails, not me,

In haste I send the one thing personalised

That I can find – a piece, unpriced, unprized,

Of what I call my talent. As you see,

I roll a sheet in the machine: my free

Fancy is summoned, though weak and undersized

These days, and, prosodically supervised,

Groans in the toils of sonneteering. Be

Assured, O Selwyn Gamble, as you sit

With papal cufflinks there in Mississippi,

Sinatran toupees, even exquisite

Silks from the famous bosomy or hippy,

Socratic pearls, or pisspots from Xanthippe –

This gift’s sincere: don’t wipe your ass with it.

FORGIVE THE LATENESS, PLEASE, OF THIS REPLY (TO MR ALAN FOX)

Forgive the lateness, please, of this reply:

The Italian postal services, alas,

Exist no longer. Should it come to pass

That you receive this, no one more than I

Will be astonished. Hopelessly, I try

Believing that there’ll be a great en masse

Breakthrough, flood of mail. But, patient ass,

I bear the burden still, and wonder why.

Thanks for your praise and thanks for your request.

A photograph? Elizabeth the First

Threw out her mirrors, and I think it best

To avoid the camera. Ugly, also cursed

With only being by my work oppressed,

I’ve no extraneous liquor for your thirst.

‘SOME CONSIDER LOVE IS GREAT’

Some consider love is great

Greater than human hate,

Greater than we estimate.

TO CHAS

If God (if God exists) deliberated

Long on the framing of the human frame

Surely the product would not be the same

As this we have – it’s far too complicated.

God would, presumably, have fabricated

A simple substance, unattacked by shame

(defecation, micturation: home – the horror)

or by illness decimated.

Moreover, there’s no tinge of godly justice:

You, sir, and I have kept it fairly clean,

Whereas the lout whose life is loot and lust is

Looked after like an opulent machine.

We’ll beat the bastards yet – by God, we must. Is

Life, is love, meant only for the mean?

‘WHAT CAN I SAY? I’D BETTER TRY A SONNET’ (TO MR PETER BRULE)

What can I say? I’d better try a sonnet

(Verse, anyway, is easier than prose),

Humility its content, I suppose,

And gratitude, like icing, troweled upon it.

The writer’s craft is difficult, doggone it,

And all too often, so it seems, and he knows

No more of it. Some new-confected bonnet

Its maker-milliner at least may see

Flaunted in public, publicly admired,

But forgers of less useful goods, like me,

Know our angelic choirs are not required,

And that is why it’s heartening to be,

As now, with some sense of usefulness enfired.

‘FORGIVE MY WRITING VERSE: I GET SO BORED’ (TO MR S. G. BYAM JR)

Forgive my writing verse: I get so bored

With prosing for a living. I did write,

I think, some effort to throw light or night

On English, in the New York Times. My sword

Was not, however, raised that there be gored

Offending flanks: there wasn’t any fight.

For my commission from the dear N. Y. T-

Imes was to write on English – nothing more, d-

ealing out data on the differences

Between American and British. You,

Dear Mr Byam, bless, since bless it is,

Me with a thing I never did. It’s true

I do deplore some downward tendencies

But someone different wrote about them. Who?

‘DEAR CHRIS, THE TROUBLE IS, AS YOU MUST KNOW’ (TO MR CHRIS MAHON)

Dear Chris, the trouble is, as you must know,

The getting over there, the getting in:

Into the States, I mean. They probe past sin,

The immigration hounds of heaven, go

Probing and prising, peering high and low

For evidence of redness, pinkness. Win?

One cannot win, even, indeed, begin

To win against these engines. Even so,

As I am likely to be there next March,

In the U.S., I mean, doing a little

Lecturing (they desiccate, they parch,

Those lectures, make the bones grow thin and brittle),

I’ll try to march beneath N.D.’s proud arch

And dole out something, just a jot or tittle.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TAE ANDREW

Mony happy returrrns o’ the day!

May ye hae a’ ye’d wish yersel’

Wi’aye guid whiskey on your shel’,

Ane haggis on the board forbye

An’ griddlecakes a’ reekin’, ay!

Lang may yer lum reek!

May Scotland feocht for freedom aye

Ah’ rin the Sassenach awa’

An’ see aince mair ane glorious day

Wi’ her ain sun flame ‘oer a’.

‘SO WILL THE FLOW OF TIME AND FIRE’

So will the flow of time and fire,

The process and the pain, expire,

And history may bow

To one eternal now.

A BALLADE FOR THE BIRTHDAY OF MY DEAREST WIFE

Various things have sabotaged the making

Of this my birthday proffer. First, the fear

Of leaving a warm spot and coldly shaking

The key like teeth (not mine, alas), the sheer

Middleaged indolence that, year by year,

Grows with my fat. But still, the urgent truth

Demands expression. Celebrate, my dear,

Another anniversary of youth.

I take on, and regret the undertaking,

Too many things, and mostly out of mere

Inertia. Projects in the oven baking,

Irons in the fire crowd time. Time comes and we’re

Overcommitted. One big time draws near

Then leaps or paws – though gently, not uncouth:

Then I’m all unprepared to clap and cheer

Another anniversary of youth.

But take this, in the time of sun’s forsaking

The glum earth, in an era of flat beer

And watered gin, when anger in its waking

Is much too tired to wake and blast the drear

World that our rulers build, when eye and ear

Survey the blazed corn like exiled Ruth.

But hope chose a November to uprear

Another anniversary of youth.

Envoi

Dearest, although the signs of age appear

In me, in greying hair, deciduous tooth,

You work your yearly miracle. Lo, here:

Another anniversary of youth.

WHISKY

Double you aitch aye ess kay ee wye spells

Irish and, without an ee, speels Scotch.

Saxon stupidity has made a botch

Out of the Celtic uisgebaugh, which tells

The truth about it. Uisge flows from wells,

But baugh means life – the seed within the crotch,

The thudding heart, tough as a cheap tin watch,

And flowing bowls, and balls, and bulls, and bells.

Whisky will do – ah, liquid sun and thunder,

Rich as the sea that beats the unnumbered pebbles.

But look at the damned tax it labours under.

One year it doubles, in the next it trebles,

Quit or sextuples. Is it any wonder

That whisky-loving men are bloody rebels?

A BALLADE FOR CHRISTMAS

Great Julius Caesar through the British race

Was despicably weaky, weedy, weeny.

And so it was and is. It’s lost all its pace,

Its morals are as brittle as grissini.

Still, in this season, greyish and ungreeny,

Something revives, survives, the thinned