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Bawdry Embraced
Great farmy whores, breasts bouncy more
Like buttocks, and with buttocks like
Two white sows jammed in a sty door,
Are no dunghills for bawdry's cock.
Nor tigery tarts, with rubber backs,
Switches for tits and neon blood,
Hurdling the beds, their silk in shrieks,
Can ever come at bawdrihood.
All iced-wedding-cakey dolls,
Molten in May's bubbly vat,
Gulped before their sugar cools
Sicken Bawdry's ostrich gut.
And the foxy slut who still
Scrubs at carrion with her brush,
Demuring down the marriage-aisle,
Can make bloody Bawdry blush.
Not in down-trousered slovenliness,
Nor vomitorial gluttony,
Bawdry's needle nakedness
Has this diamond in its eye:
Time was Tailfever struck this town.
There was not one cramped street
But stroked itself to trembling curves
When he glanced at it.
Tailfever was a bawdreur good,
Raging delicate beast,
He trod this town a calendar
To find his bawdriste.
Tom-catting over walls and tiles,
His bared weapon blazed
As if a firedrake through the dark
Dragged him by the waist.
The lily virgin at her prayer
Who heard the roof shake
And ran to draw the blind, fell
Deflowered at his look.
Till bright a day, and dark a day,
His palate picked out
Of promiscuity's butchery
Sweety Undercut.
Born bawdriste, in all England
Never came better.
Heaven itself blazed in her bush.
Tailfever got her.
From what dog's dish or crocodile's rotten
Larder she had come
He questioned none: "It is enough
That she is and I am."
They caught each other by the body
And fell in a heap;
A cockerel there struck up a tread
Like a cabman's whip.
And so they knit, knotted and wrought,
Braiding their ends in;
So fed their radiance to themselves
They could not be seen.
And thereupon-a miracle!
Each became a lens
So focussing creation's heat
The other burst in flames.
Bawdry! Bawdry! Steadfastly
Thy great protagonists
Died face to face, with bellies full,
In the solar waste
Where there is neither skirt nor coat,
And every ogling eye
Is a cold star to measure
Their solitude by.
August 1956