Classic Poem

The giddy sun's kaleidoscope,
The pivot of a switchback world,
Is tied to it by many a rope:
The people (flaunting streamers), furled
Metallic banners of the seas,
The giddy sun's kaleidoscope
Casts colors on the face of these:
Cosmetics of Eternity,
And powders faces blue as death;
Beneath the parasols we see
Gilt faces tarnished by sea-breath,
And crawling like the foam, each horse
Beside the silken tents of sea
In whirlpool-circles takes his course.
Huge houses, humped like camels, chase
The wooden horses' ceaseless bound;
The throbbing whirring sun that drags
The streets upon its noisy round,
With tramways chasing them in vain,
Projects in colored cubes each face —
Then shatters them upon our brain.
The house-fronts hurl them back; they jar
Upon cross-currents of the noise:
Like atoms of my soul they are,
They shake the body's equipoise —
A clothesline for the Muse to fly
(So thin and jarred and angular)
Her rags of tattered finery.
Beneath the heat the trees' sharp hue —
A ceaseless whirr, metallic-green —
Sounds like a gimlet shrilling through
The mind, to reach the dazzling sheen
Of meanings life can not decide:
Then words set all awry, and you
Are left upon the other side.
Our senses, each a wooden horse
We paint, till they appear to us
Like life, and then queer strangers course
In our place on each Pegasus.
The very heat seems but to be
The product of some man-made force —
Steam from the band's machinery.
The heat is in a thousand rags
Reverberant with sound, whose dry
Frayed ends we never catch, like tags
Of an unfinished entity;
And like a stretched accordion
The houses throb with heat, and flags
Of smoke are tunes light plays upon.
The band's kaleidoscopic whirr
Tears up those jarring threads of heat,
The crowds: plush mantles seem to purr;
Crustacean silk gowns take the beat
From houses; each reverberates
From this vitality and stir
The giddy heat acerbates.
And in the swirling restaurant
Where liqueurs at perpetual feud
Dispute for sequined lights and taunt
Hot leaves, our dusty souls exude
Their sentiments, while scraps of sense
Float inward from the band and flaunt —
Disturb the general somnolence.