What value can reside in one-way things,
Again, of one who only One-ways sings,
I hear it asked. Let us get that over now —
Then we'll step Timewards, stiffly to kowtow.
Are we poor One-ways not of such a stuff
As words are wasted on? One word's enough,
Any crass epithet, to express our lot,
Of stucco Fronts, under sentence to be shot,
That strut and pant in insect packs — what's that
To agitate a serious pen? They have spat
Upon their work, the gods who thought us out.
Let us spare our pains. Fresh verse about to spout,

The tongues of nineteen cantos now have smote
Upon the sodden air. I've changed my coat
As many times, you may have thought old son!
A man of fashion has more suits than one
You know, and if I come up looking different
At each fresh bout, it is always the same stiff front,
Under whatever homespun, twill or tweed,
I shroud my one-way sawdust-stuffed six-feet.
" Still, who is this Time-god or Time-king", you'll say,
" Over what if anything does he hold sway?
It's the first I've heard of His Omnipotence

So let us sing the Song of the Fronts! Each day
By african bush-telegraph let us convey
Covertly the tidings of the Time-god's rebuff —
They have bubbled the world for too long with their bluff.
No more than common snuff-box chat it is
Our rapporteur was lulled with silver-fizz
And Lucky Strikes into a comic grin
And a condition bordering on spleen
At the crisis of his boredom he confessed
That he worked best without his pants and vest —
And had often in the labyrinth at Antibes
Lain sun-cooked side by side with other sheep,

Ring all bells backwards — enter by sally-ports,
Make towers of wells, night-clubs of lunch-resorts —
Make cuirasses of feathers, walls of down —
Turn inside out the street-fronts of this town,
Till people cook and copulate on shelves
Above our thoroughfares and wash themselves
In roaring gutters in the public view —
So banish privacy, disintegrate Me and You —
Coughing on ladders tenants ascend, and those
Already up their private-parts disclose
(Lest faces vaunted a greater " publicness"
Of spirit or of flesh, in frank undress —

So much for the politics of the Fronts and Backs
(It's not our business to clobber the world's cracks)!
A sunburst of diamonds can attract our stare,
Not the extinct paste splashing the hennaed hair
Of a vaudeville empress, the mortgaged splendour hit
With death-dues, not the jazz-bred aristocrat —
That is the refuse of the pawnshop. That
Can be left in the gutter to hold out its hat.
As said by Flaubert, it had not the animal will
To hold what it had got — now it can only sell
Others, having long ago lost its own,

But to be debacked , that is the worst of the lot,
Worse than beheading. And that is what we've got.
For it is better to have a head and nothing else,
Than just the Fronts without the concomitant shells.
Our nursery of Backs, all those fate would remove —
We hang in vacuo — circle in fashion's groove.
Beyond question it is our lot to be all Front,
All temporal bustle, tantamount to a stunt
To affect to run — all the wild gestures of speed —
Stock-still in fact, we stamp out Change's seed.
(From this revolution there can be no revolt —

But give me England. Give me next to her
Her shadow if you have it. I think that's fair!
Give me her Back, with whatever riveted;
If her Front's in pieces, give me her Front dead!
I can't say more than that — a chip's enough
To fancy the old block-back, if it's top-carat stuff.
Give me a sort of buttercup — my loss
To shadow forth and symbolize of course.
Souvenir-hunter! rifle her corpse, but give
A public hair to me, with the old british whiff!
I'm for the old tart every time — for her

Be that as it may I should be sorry to be dead
From the head down, or from the front back: that head
That is in fact footless, is a factitious crown —
Summit of nothing, cut off from the neck down,
Decapitated — since what without his ship
Is a captain — the spike gone what is the tip?
What also is the briskest Front on earth
Whose Back is riveted throughout its girth —
Whose shop-front of pugnacity and pep
Is held in place with rivets in the back shop?
To be decapitated or to be defronted
Is much the same — from the Front backwards dead,

I'm all for Backs then (though it is Fronts I sing) —
All for them inasmuch as frontness does spring
From this behindness, just as in mirrors all
That you perceive springs from their mercury wall —
Without that opaque backing of their glass
No reflex phantom would start out at us. —
To keep a calm sough, a peace-in-our-time pipe
Gushing a sodden cloud, the Toby-type,
Above a pot of mildly befuddling hops,
Propped up unbuttoned in the shoppiest of back-shops,
Of a nation-of-shopkeepers — with an eye to the main chance

But the Back is father to the Front. All's young
Before. Behind from occiput to bung
All's old as is creation. Nature's face
Is accidental with the functional maze:
Not so that polished nothingness that goes
With all that lives, its hindmost end to close.
Let us praise Backs! — the Back at least is chaste —
That that can keep its place, let it be praised!
Possessing the art most tactfully to dress
Nonentity in a black magnificentness.
Let that even above Fronts be loudly praised!
(Best to be nowt, too, than a negative thing —