The Fat Man in the Mirror

What's filling up the mirror? O, it is not I;

Hair-belly like a beaver's house? An old dog's eye?

The forenoon was blue

In the mad King's zoo

Nurse was swinging me so high, so high!

The bullies wrestled on the royal bowling green;

Hammers and sickles on their hoods of black sateen...

Smoking on my swing,

The yellow-fingered King

Sliced apples with a pen-knife for his Queen.

This I, who used to mouse about the parafinned preserves,

And jammed a finger in the coffee-grinder, serves

Time before the mirror.

But this flabby terror . . .

Nurse, it is a person! It is nerves.

O where is Mother waltzing like a top to staunch

The blood of Rudolf, King of Faerie? Hip and haunch

Lard the royal grotto;

Straddling Rudolf's motto,

Time, the Turk, its sickle on its paunch . ..

Nurse, nurse, it rises on me... O, it starts to roll,

My apples, O, are charcoal in the meerschaum bowl . . .

If you'd only come,

If you'd only come,

Darling, if . . . The apples that I stole,

When nurse and I were swinging in the Old One's eye...

Only a fat man with his beaver on his eye,

Only a fat man,

Only a fat man

'Breaks the mirror. O, it is not I!