(for Christopher Isherwood)

Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call the House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics
Raise a cheer to Mrs.
Nature for the primal
Pleasure She bestows.

*** is but a dream to
Seventy-and-over,
But a joy proposed un-
-til we start to shave:
Mouth-delight depends on
Virtue in the cook, but
This She guarantees from
Cradle unto grave.

Lifted off the *****,
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.

Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.

All the arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers' lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ized en-
During excrement.

Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter boxes
Built in their façade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.

Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open through our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a king ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.

Keep us in our station:
When we get pound-notish,
When we seem about to
Take up Higher Thought,
Send us some deflating
Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major
Prophet taken short.

(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees.)

Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Auden & Isherwood
strolling in China

trying to soak up
The War

by the process of
osmosis

staining it
with words

observe
(at first what seems)  

green horses

but turns out to be
only white horses

painted green
for camouflage purposes.

That evening in Canton
also offering them

the futility of two men

trying to put a rat
into a bottle

a woman who lived
in a beehive

pouring water
into a sieve.

War knocks
over the inkwell

spills
into men’s lives

covers the white pages
of their wishes

makes the idea of Hell
...all   too   real.

The spilt ink eating
the words of men

who send letters home
and die in pain

never to return

only in other’s memories
& useless dreams

marble memorials

while green horses
champ the grasses

the bridles & the bits
clanking & glinting

in the hot sun
of Now.

as this last lost evening
dies.

She rates at
twenty-seven degrees,
a bit of a tease
if you ask me,
but no one asks me
I am only the camera.

Thinking we're autonomous
until the night creeps up in on us
and the Monsters make a mockery
of me.

I am not the camera,
not the lens
not Isherwood,
just
a man with some pens
and time on his hands
to fashion a rhyme

Lowry
painted me,
a matchstick man
and I saw a triumph
heard bugles call,
didn't know I was Humpty
'til
I fell off the wall.

But
I am fully functioning
firing on six
jumping the red lights
to get in the mix.

it's character acting that
attracts so many and so
many lose themselves
in the characters they create

I can relate to that.

I believe Picasso
let me go
because
he was blue,
another character trait
that fell through.

I always want the other end of the rainbow.

Does it sometimes feel to you
that there are eleven days in
the week?
if yawning was an Olympic sport
I'd win in the final.

and it's still quite dark
even outside of my heart.

96443
is this the number that
will define me or just
the carriage I'm in?

I didn't win the lottery?
poor me.

But I look at it this way,
I'm alive and
it'll be the kind of day I
want it to be.

'Make it so'
echoes of Star Trek a
few years ago.

The tube turns into
a troop carrier,
an
army that can't liberate
itself,
the 'dawn patrol'
under somebody
else's control.

Are you getting this ?

we're walking our way
into less and less pay
for more and more work.

We'll all be begging soon.
except for the idle rich,
that'd be too much like
work for them.

I am not Isherwood,
but I can be a camera,

I think she's trying to hide
what do you think?

I think thinking should be
tax deductible.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Auden & Isherwood
strolling in China

trying to soak up
The War

by the process of
osmosis

staining it
with words

observe
(at first what seems)  

green horses

but turns out to be
only white horses

painted green
for camouflage purposes.

That evening in Canton
also offering them

the futility of two men

trying to put a rat
into a bottle

a woman who lived
in a beehive

pouring water
into a sieve.

War knocks
over the inkwell

spills
into men’s lives

covers the white pages
of their wishes

makes the idea of Hell
...all   too   real.

The spilt ink eating
the words of men

who send letters home
and die in pain

never to return

only in other’s memories
& useless dreams

marble memorials

while green horses
champ the grasses

the bridles & the bits
clanking & glinting

in the hot sun
of Now.

as this last lost evening
dies.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Auden & Isherwood
strolling in China

trying to soak up
The War

by the process of
osmosis

staining it
with words

observe
(at first what seems)  

green horses

but turns out to be
only white horses

painted green
for camouflage purposes.

That evening in Canton
also offering them

the futility of two men

trying to put a rat
into a bottle

a woman who lived
in a beehive

pouring water
into a sieve.

War knocks
over the inkwell

spills
into men’s lives

covers the white pages
of their wishes

makes the idea of Hell
...all   too   real.

The spilt ink eating
the words of men

who send letters home
and die in pain

never to return

only in others' memories
& useless dreams

marble memorials

while green horses
champ the grasses

the bridles & the bits
clanking & glinting

in the hot sun
of Now.

as this last lost evening
dies.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Auden & Isherwood
strolling in China
trying to soak up

The War
by the process of
osmosis

staining it
with words
observe

(at first what seems)  
green horses
but turns out to be

only white horses
painted green
for camouflage purposes.

that evening in Canton
also offering them
the futility of two men

trying to
put a rat
into a bottle

a woman who lived
in a beehive
pouring water into a sieve

War knocks
over the inkwell
spills into men’s lives

covers
the white pages
of their wishes

makes the idea
of Hell
all too real

the spilt ink
eating
the words of men

who send letters home
and die in pain
never to return

only in others' memories
& useless dreams
marble memorials

while green horses
champ the grasses
the bridles & the bits

clanking & glinting
in the hot sun
of Now

as this last lost
evening
dies


*

Sonnets from China was originally published in a considerably different form as “In Time of War.” “In Time of War” was a sonnet sequence included in Journey to a War (December 1938), a book by Auden and Christopher Isherwood that included a travel diary, photos, and a long poetic commentary.

Here is one of Auden's magnificent sonnets from that journey...

HERE WAR IS SIMPLE

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.

There was Sappho, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, Tennessee Williams, Hart Crane, Yukio Mishima, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Liz Bishop, James Baldwin...my point, all of them ******* to a man, would drink u under the table (w/ good expensive bourbon), acknowledged genius intellectual poets, would kick ur punk *** with a left-right combination; so, on that note, I never, ever want to hear about a hate-crime committed by shaved-headed closet-cases who hate mirrors & can't admit the mirror even exists; now, that's ugly---gay is way weird (I tried it, didn't like it) but some of the greatest thinkers & doers (Alexander accepted, turned by Aristotle no less but maybe not, considering Plato's influence on the latter, a-hem---for the record Socrates was not, ******' horn-dog he was; now consider being a ***** straight old man (hello!) in a society dominated by questionably gay men and an overtly gay-male aesthetic (remember, to the Greeks the 'naked lady' was a revelation although horn-dogs (wizards, magicians) have been rubbing them out(pun) for millennia (this became writing but that in itself is only tangential to the overall topic).) have been proudly if not cross-dressedly (yes) homosexual; hell, the entire Greek system of city-states was predicated on buggery, pederasty & ****** (whatever that was & still is but the word doesn't get bandied about the way it did in good ol' gay-baiting (Wilde & Turing suffered for it; Genet & Isherwood reveled in it) days. Francis Bacon would kick ur as right now if he were here & he'd do it drunk. Hemingway (questionably): "***** is the willingness to do sober what one would do drunk."

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Auden & Isherwood
strolling in China

trying to soak up
The War

by the process of
osmosis

staining it
with words

observe
(at first what seems)  

green horses

but turns out to be
only white horses

painted green
for camouflage purposes.

That evening in Canton
also offering them

the futility of two men

trying to put a rat
into a bottle

a woman who lived
in a beehive

pouring water
into a sieve.

War knocks
over the inkwell

spills
into men’s lives

covers the white pages
of their wishes

makes the idea of Hell
...all   too   real.

The spilt ink eating
the words of men

who send letters home
and die in pain

never to return

only in others' memories
& useless dreams

marble memorials

while green horses
champ the grasses

the bridles & the bits
clanking & glinting

in the hot sun
of Now.

as this last lost evening
dies.

discovered the penguin poetry of
the thirties
and then isherwood’s goodbye to
berlin and then
spender and mcneice and the rest
easy I was passionate
about betjeman    ..