Classic Poem

Anger that is not anger, but bubbles and stars of colour, blood in the brain beating the nerves into a frenzy of inner light, magnified moons and suns swimming in the secret understanding that is more the body than the mind, the soul upon the lips for no reason at all, or at the sound of a door or the tinkle of gold and silver money in the street, faces best known and most remembered estranged and a million miles away, and strange greasy faces passing in the dust of evening and now returning illuminated into godhead, cruelty where it cannot be, kindness where hatred is as inevitable as the white rising of a morning where morning may after all never more rise, disintegrate yet exquisite destruction of the heart at the moment of waking, desire for death like the vagueness of a thirst for thin extravagant wine, unredeemed by fear, mortal and importunate screams of why, why, why, in the extreme desolation of regained consciousness, loneliness, loneliness and indolence that is forever stigmatized by itself as a spiritual inertia, but which is in reality the desperate desire for common sleep among the sounds of a camp or village in which kinsfolk are gathered together for protection against wolves or robbers out of northern immensities of snow, sudden and intolerable perceptions, clear and pitiless, which tear the rags from all cradles, marriage beds and death beds, dead persons wherever lying, and all graves and altars of the dead, the sword twisted, twisted and turned in the breast unceasingly at the recurrent thought of that cruelty which cannot be true, the throat full of tears to be drunk again augmented by bitterness and thirst, the enormous loneliness of the room floating like a glass tank full of horror over the eyes and the breast and the crossed hands and feet of the stone image upon the bed, the window of the mirror which looks out into nothing, the other windows which look out into earthquakes and the fall of Herculaneum, the beat of the heart against the breast-bone and the ribs, in the temples and in the finger-tips, the pillow for weariness, the comfort and the coolness, lost and grown synonymous with that cruelty which cannot be true, the golden head for which the dead heart cries, the dead heart turning, which so turned among falling towers, burning, burning and crying to the sky, the thing no longer recognizable cast up by a sea full of green ice, the birds which appear to weep for it, but are in reality making ready to devour it, wheeling and crying to each other in cruelty, in ecstasy, which is nevertheless forgivable because it is a hunger of the body and not a spiritual exaltation, the cruelty, that other cruelty, the blow turning blue over the heart, the sudden sliding drop into another half-sleep which is immediately startled to madness by the sound of the falling towers of Herculaneum and Troy, the smoke, the dust, the stench, which is better than the green ice and the snow untracked save by wolves whose tracks are red, the couch in the desert, the grave in the desert, the couch upon the mountainside, the grave under the stars, the rock which will not speak and the water which will not listen, falling, falling down the mountainside over the rock with a noise of voices, the recurrent blow over the heart, the blow over the heart and the bruise turning blue upon the flesh, the arms lifted up to a sky full of screaming birds and stars which are falling, falling over the mountainside upon the towers which house the golden head and the dead heart and the tongues of inextinguishable fire.