Birth-Dues

Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely contemptible,

the dangled

Carrot that leads to market or precipice;

But limitary pain-the rock under the tower and the hewn

coping

That takes thunder at the head of the turret-

Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish carving

himself

With knives will seem to have conquered the world.

Robinson Feffers

The world's God is treacherous and full of unreason; a

torturer, but also

The only foundation and the only fountain.

Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes of hunger;

who hides in the grave

To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian

Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in love with the

God is washed clean

Of death desired and of death dreaded.

He has joy, but joy is a trick in the air; and pleasure, but

pleasure is contemptible;

And peace; and is based on solider than pain.

He has broken boundaries a little and that will estrange

him; he is monstrous, but not

To the measure of the God. . . . But I having told you-

However, I suppose that few in the world have energy to

hear effectively-

Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the people.

Robinson Feffers