Penny Lilley

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Of lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows?

There will be time

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

Asleep... tired... or it malingers

“Do I dare?” And, “Do I dare?"

Like a patient etherised upon a table

I have heard mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat, and snicker

Should I, after tea and cakes and iced, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

They will say: “how his hair is growing thin!”... “but how his arms and legs are thin!"

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was I meant to be; Am an attendant lord... the Fool

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo

Time yet for a hundred indecision’s, and for a hundred visions and revisions

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes

To lead you to an overwhelming question

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

Would it have been worth it... would it have been worth while

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase

With smells of steak in passageways

Six O’clock

And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps

The morning comes to consciousness

Sawdust-trampled street With all it’s muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands

One thinks of all the hands that are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms

The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted

The light crept up between the shutters And you herd the sparrows in the gutters

You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands

Clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands

His souls stretched right across the skies That fade behind a city block

At four and five and six o’clock

Assured of certain certainties

Mistah Kurts-he dead A penny for the old guy

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men

Our fried voices when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless

Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion

Those who have crossed... Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violet souls but only as the hollow men

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In deaths dream kingdom

Voices are... More distant and more solemn than a fading star.

In deaths dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises

Behaving as the wind behaves

This is the dead land This is cactus land

The supplication of a dead mans hand Under the twinkle of a fading star

Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone

In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech

Sightless unless The eyes reappear

Here we go around the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear

Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow

The conscience fo the blackened street

The notion of some infinity gentle Infinitely suffering thing

Old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain ... chestnuts... female smells... cigarettes... cocktail

Washed out small pox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose... She is alone

The lamp said “You have the key... Mount. ... Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.” The last twist of the knife

Regard the moon, she winks a feeble eye She smiles into corners

Rust that clings to the firm that the strength has left Hard and curled and ready to snap

I could see nothing behind that child’s eye

Eaten smooth and polished As if the world gave up

The street lamp sputtered... muttered...

The memory throws up high and dry A crowd of twisted things

Dissolve the floors of memory And all it’s clear relations

Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium

Twelve o’clock... Half-past one... Half-past two

Held in lunar synthesis Whispering lunar incantations

For Thine is Life is For Thine is the

Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a whimper

The ways dead and the weather sharp The very dead of winter

There were times we regretted... the terraces And the silken girls bringing sherbet

And cities hostile and towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices A hard time we had of it

Voices singing in our ears saying That this was all for folly

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley... And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory

We’re we led all that way for Birth or Death?

I hade seen birth and death but had thought they were different

With an alien people clutching their gods I should be glad of another death