Thirst!
Not the thirst of the throat
Though that be the wildest and worst
Of physical pangs--- that smote
Alone to the heart of Christ
Wring the one wild cry
“I thirst!“ from his agony,
While the soldiers drank and diced:
Not the thirst benign
That calls the worker to wine;
Not the bodily thirst
(Though that be frenzy accursed)
When the mouth is full of sand,
And the eyes are gummed up, and the ears
Trick the soul ‘till it hears
Water, water at hand,
When a man will dig his nails
In his breast, and drink the blood
Already that clots and stales
Ere his tongue can tip its flood,
When the sun is a living devil,
Vomiting vats of evil
And the moon and the night but mock
The wretch on his barren rock,
And the dome of heaven high-arched
Like his mouth is arid and parched
And the caves of his heart high-spanned
Are choked with alkali sand!
Not this ! But a thirst uncharted ;
Body and soul alike
Traitors turned black-hearted
Seeking a place to strike
In a victim already attuned
To one vast chord of wound;
Every separate bone
Cold ,an incarnate groan
Distilled from the icy sperm
Of hell’s implacable worm;
Every drop of the river
Of blood aflame and a-quiver
With poison secret and sour-
With a sudden twitch at the last
Like certain jagged daggers
(With bloodshot eyes dull-glassed
The screaming Malay staggers
Through his village aghast).
So blood wrenches its pain
Sardonic through the heart and brain.
Every separate nerve
Awake and alert, on a curve
Whose asymptote’s name is “never”
In a hyperbolic “for ever!”
A bitten and burning snake
Striking it’s venom within it,
As if it might serve to slake
The pain for the tithe of a minute.
Awake, for ever awake!
Awake as one never is
While sleep is a possible end,
Awake in the void, the abyss
Whose thirst is an echo of this
That martyrs, world without end
(World without end, Amen!)
The man that falters and yields
For the proverb’s “month and an hour :
To the lure of the snow-starred fields
Where the opium poppy’s aflower.
Only the prick of a needle,
Charged from a wizard well!
Is this sufficient to wheedle
A soul from heaven to hell?
Was man’s spirit weaned from fear of it’s ghosts and gods
To fawn at the feet of a fiend?
Is it such terrible odds---
The heir of ages of wonder,
The crown of earth for an hour,
The master of tide and thunder
Against the juice of a flower?
Ay! In the roar and the rattle
Of all the armies of sin,
This is the only battle
He never was know to win.
Slave to the thirst--not thirst
As it is here weakly written,
Not thirst in the brain black-bitten,
In the soul more sorely smitten!
One dare not think of the wildest and worst!
Beyond the raging and raving
Hell of the physical craving
Lies, in the brain benumbed,
At the end of time and space,
An abyss, unmeasured, unplumbed---
The haunt of a face!
She it is, she, that found me
In the Morphia honeymoon;
With silk and steel she bound me,
In her poisonous milk she drowned me,
Even now her arms surround me,
Stifling me into the soon
That still--but oh, how rarely!--
Comes at the thrust of the needle,
Steadily stares and squarely,
Nor needs to fondle and wheedle
Her slave agasp for a kiss
Hers whose horror is his
That knows that viper womb,
Speckled and barred with black
On it’s rusty amber scales,
Is his tomb--
The straining, groaning, rack
On which he wails--he wails!
Her Cranial dome is vaulted,
Her mad Mongolian eyes
Aslant with the ecstasies
Of things immune, exalted
Far beyond the stars and skies,
Slits of amber and jet--
Her snout for the quarry set
Fleshy and heavy and gross,
Bestial, broken across,
And below it her mouth that drips
Blood from the lips
That hide the fangs of a snake,
Drips on venomous udders
Mountainous flanks that fret,
And the spirit sickens and shudders
At the hint of a worse thing yet.
Olya! The golden bait
Barbed with infinite pain,
Fatal, fanatical mate
Of a poisoned body and brain!
Olya, the name that leers
It’s lecherous longing and knavery,
Whispering in crazing ears
The secret spell of her slavery.
Horror indeed intense,
Seduction ever intenser,
Swinging the smoke of sense
From the bowl of a smoldering censer!
Behind me, behind and above,
She stands, that mirror of love.
Her fingers are supple-jointed,
Her nails are polished and pointed,
And tipped with spurs of gold:
With them she rowels the brain.
Her lust is critical cold;
And her Chinese cheeks are pale,
As she daintily picks, profane
With her octopus lips, and the teeth
Jagged and black beneath,
Pulp and blood from a nail.
One swift prick was enough
In days gone by to invoke her
She was incarnate love
In the hours when I first awoke her.
Little by little I found
The truth of her, stripped of clothing,
Bitter beyond all bounds,
Leprous beyond all loathing.
Black the plague of the pit,
Her pustules visibly fester,
Cancerous kisses that bit
As the asp caressed her.
Dragon of lure and dread,
Tiger of fury and lust,
The quick in chains to the dead,
The slime alive in the dust,
Brazen shame like a flame,
An orgy of pregnant pollution
With hate beyond aim or name--
Orgasm, death, dissolution!
Know you now why her eyes
So fearfully glaze, beholding
Terrors and infamies
Like filthy flowers unfolding?
Laughter widowed of ease,
Agony barred from sadness,
Death defeated of peace,
Is she not madness?
She waits for me, lazily leering
As moon goes murdering moon
The moon of her triumph is nearing;
She will have me wholly soon.
………………………………...........
And you, you puritan others,
Who have missed the Morphia craving,
Cry scorn if I call you brothers,
Curl lip at my maniac raving,
Fools, seven times beguiled,
You have not known her? Well!
There was never a need she smiled
To harry you into hell
Morphia is but one
Spark of its secular fire.
She is the single sun--
Type of all desire!
All the you would, you are--
And that is the crown of a craving.
You are slaves of the wormwood star.
Analyzed, reason is raving.
Feeling, examined, is pain.
What heaven were to hope for a doubt of it!
Life is anguish, insane;
And death is--- not a way out of it!
