Poetry · Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1/3)

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

Exodus

Exodus lay under an oak-tree

Bordering on Buda Pest he had lain

him down to over-night under the lofty rain

of starlight

having leapt from the womb

eighteen years ago and grown

neglected along the shores of the Danube

on the Danube in the Danube

—or breaking his legs behind runaway horses⁠—

with a Carnival quirk

every Shrove Tuesday

Of his riches

a Patriarch

erected a synagogue

— —for the people

His son

looked upon Lea

— — of the people

she sat in Synagogue

—her hair long as the Talmud

—her tamarind eyes⁠— —

and disinherited

begat this Exodus

Imperial Austria taught the child

the German secret patriotism

the Magyar tongue the father

stuffed him with biblical Hebrew and the

seeds of science exhorting him

to vindicate

his forefather’s ambitions

The child

flowered precociously fever

smote the father

the widowed mother

took to her bosom a spouse

of her own sphere

and hired

Exodus in apprenticeship

to such as garrulously inarticulate

ignore the cosmic cultures

Sinister foster-parents

who lashed the boy

to that paralysis of

the spiritual apparatus

common to

the poor

The arid gravid

intellect of jewish ancestors

the senile juvenile

calculating prodigies of Jehovah

—Crushed by the Occident ox

they scraped

the gold gold golden

muck from off its hoofs⁠—

moves Exodus to emmigrate

coveting the alien

asylum of voluntary military

service paradise of the pound-stirling

where the domestic Jew in lieu

of knouts is lashed with tongues

The cannibal God

shutters his lids of night on the day’s gluttony

the partially devoured humanity

warms its unblessed beds with bare prostrations

An insect from an herb

errs on the man-mountain

imparts its infinitesimal tactile stimulus

to the epiderm to the spirit

of Exodus

stirring the anaesthetised load

of racial instinct frustrated

impulse infantile impacts with unreason

on his unconscious

Blinking his eyes⁠— — —

at sunrise Exodus

lumbar-aching sleep logged turns his ear

to the grit earth and hears

the boom of cardiac cataracts

thumping the turf

with his young pulse

He is undone! How should he know

he has a heart The Danube

gives no instruction in anatomy⁠—

the primary

throb of the animate

a beating mystery

pounds on his ignorance

in seeming

death dealing⁠—

The frightened fatalist

clenches his eyes

for the involuntary sacrifice

stark

to the sun-zumm dirges of

a bee

he lays him out

for his heart-beats to slay him

It is not accomplished

the burning track

of lengthening sun shafts

spur

This lying-in-state of a virility

to rise

and in his surprised

protracted viability

shoulder his pack

Exodus whose initiations

in arrogance through brief

stimulation of his intellect

in servitude through early

ill-usage etch involute

inhibitions

upon his sensibility

sharpened and blunted he

—bound for his unformulate

conception of life⁠—

makes for the harbour

and the dogged officer of Destiny

kept Exodus

and that which he begat

moving along

The highest paid tailor’s

cutter in the “City”

Exodus Lord Israel

nicknamed from his consummate bearing

his coaly eye

challenging the unrevealed universe

speaking fluently “business-English”

to the sartorial world

jibbering stock exchange quotations

and conundrums of finance

to which unlettered immigrants are instantly

initiate

Those foreigners

before whom the soul

of the new Motherland

stands nakedly incognito

in so many ciphers

In the boarding-house the lady with

the locket “You will excuse me⁠— —

Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones in

her fingers” Exodus at leisure

painting knowing not why

sunflowers turned sunwards

Sundays when

England closed the eyes of every

commercial enterprise

but the church and spewed

her silent servants out of her areas

in their bi-weekly “best” to

“Ow get along with you” their lurching lovers

along the rails of parks

The high-striped soldiers of the swagger-stick

tempting the wilder flowers of womanhood

to lick-be-quick ice cream

outside the barracks

This jovian hebrew “all dressed up

and nowhere to go”

stands like a larch

upon the corners of incarcerate streets

deploring the anomalous legs

of Zion’s sons

with the subconscious

irritant of superiority

left in an aristocacy out of currency

paces

the cancellated desert of the metropolis

with the instinctive urge of loneliness

to get to “the heart of something”

The heart of England

sporting its oak

on the rude ratepayer

Hymns ancient and modern

belabour crippled cottage-grands

in parlour fronts

A thrush

shatters its song upon the spurious shade

of a barred bird-fancier’s

The dumb philosophies

of the wondering jew

fall into rhythm with

long unlistened-to hebrew chants

A wave

“out of tide” with the surrounding

ocean he breaks

insensitized non-participance upon himself

(The) unperceived

conqueror of a new world

in terms of cutting and drafting

Exodus lifts his head

over the alien crowds

under the alien clouds

proudly as memory

evokes the panic-stricken

discoverer of his own heart coming

barefoot to the Synagogue

erected by his grandfather — — —

The Rabbi said “Your grandfather

was a great and a just man

we reap what he has sown

— honoured be his memory so here’s

your fare third class

May the God of Israel

bless thee among the Gentiles”

And the God of the Gentiles

blessed him among Israel

he had several

shares in the South Eastern

Railway and other

securities Suddenly

he remembers how his mother

told him he was a seven month’s child

—thing of etherial circulation⁠—

wrapped in wadding somewhat

green-seeming as an untimely apple

And Exodus feels cold

with sympathy for that cold thing

that was himself — — —

The London dusk

wraps up the aborted entity

heeding Solomon’s admonishing spends

circumcised circumspect

his evenings doing lightning calculations

for his high pleasure Painting — — —

feeling his pulse — — —

Incorporeal express trains

from opposite directions

of unequal lengths and velocities

flash through his abstract eye

determines instantly the time

to a decimal fraction of a second

they take to pass each other

Under his ivory hands

his sunflowers sunwards

glow confuse with itinerant

Judaic eyes peering

through narrow-slim entrance-arches

The terrestrial trees shades

virgin bosoms and blossoms

in course of his acclimatization

a hedge-rose — — — —

He paints

He feels his pulse

The spiritual tentacles of vanity

that each puts out towards the culture

of his epoch knowing not how to find

and finding not contact he has repealed

to fumble among his guts

The only

personal reality

he brought from Hungary he takes

to Harley street where medicine

sits the only social science applied to the outsider

The parasite attaches to the English Rose

— — — — — at a guinea a visit

— becomes more tangible to himself the exile

mechanism he learns is built

to the same osseous structure shares

identical phenomena with those

populating the Island

that segregated

from his apprehension moves

a universe of unceasing

energies for the biological

explorer’s introspection

His body

becomes the target of his speculation

His brain ravenous for informative food

spins cobwebs on the only available

branching out of facts

clings to the visceral

items he has heard mentioned

until they ache

under mesmeric concentration

Exodus discovers his nerves

as once Mankind

in pathological mysticism believed

itself to have discovered

its soul

David’s daughter’s doweries

and olive-eyes

virgins capitalized

to tantalize!

Jehovah’s tailor

sets up in business for himself

however

Some queer

marital independence on the English air

keeping him bachelor

While through

stock quotations

and Latin prescriptions

for physic

filters the lyric

aroma of the rose

Exodus knows

no longer father

or brother

or the God of the Jews,

it is his to choose

finance or

romance of the rose

English Rose

Early English everlasting

quadrate Rose

paradox⁠—Imperial

trimmed with some travestied flesh

tinted with bloodless duties dewed

with Lipton’s teas

and grimed with crack-packed

herd-housing

petalling

the prim gilt

penetralia

of a lustre scioned

core-crown;

Rose of arrested impulses

self pruned

of the primordial attributes

— A tepid heart inhibiting

with tactful terrorism

the (Blossom) Populous

to mystic incest with its ancestry

establishing

by the divine right of self assertion

the post-conceptual

virginity of Nature

Wiping

its pink paralysis

across the dawn of reason

A World-blush

glowing from

a never-setting-sun

Conservative Rose

storage

of British Empire-made pot-pourri

of dry dead men making a sweetened smell

among a shrivelled collectivity

Which august dust

stirred by

the trouser-striped prongs of statesmanship

(whenever politic)

rises upon the puff of press alarm

and whirling itself

deliriously around the unseen

Bolshevik subsides

in ashy circularity

“a wreath” upon the unknown

soldier’s grave

And Jehovah strikes,

through the fetish

of the island hedges,

Exodus

who on his holiday

(induced

by the insiduous pink

of Albion’s ideal)

is looking for a rose

And the rose

rises

from the green

of a green lane

rosily-stubborn

and robustly round

— — — — —

Under a pink print

sunbonnet

the village maid

scowls at the heathen

Albion

in female form

salutes the alien Exodus

staring so hard⁠—

warms his nostalgia

on her belligerent innocence

— — The maidenhead

drooping her lid

and pouting of her breast

— — forewarns

his amity

— — — — —

Amorphous meeting

in the month of May

— — — — —

This Hebrew

culled by Cupid on a thorn

of the rose

lays siege

to the thick hedgerows

where she blows

on Christian Sundays

She

simpering in her

ideological pink

He

loaded with Mosaic

passions that amass

like money

implores her to take pity

upon him

and come and be a “lady in the City”

Maiden emotions

bread

on leaves of novels

where anatomical man

has no notion

of offering other than the bended knee

to femininity

and purity

passes in pleasant ways

as the cows graze⁠—

For in those days

when Exodus courted the rose

literature was supposed to elevate us

So the maid with puffy

bosom where Jerusalem

dreams to ease

his head of calculations

in the Zero of ecstasy

and a little huffy

bristles with chastity

For this is the last Judgment

when Jehovah

roars “Open your mouth!

and I will tell you what you have been reading”

Exodus had been reading

Proverbs

making sharp distinction

between the harlot

and the Hausfrau arraying

her offspring in scarlet

approving

such as garner good advice like grain

and such as know enough

to come in from the rain — —

The would-be

secessionist from Israel’s etiquette

(shielding pliant Jewesses from shame

less glances

And the giving

of just percentages

to matrimonial intermediaries)

is spiritually intrigued

by the Anglo-Saxon phenomenon

of Virginity

delightfully

on its own defensive!

This pouting

pearl beyond price

flouting

the male pretentions

to its impervious surface

Alice the gentile

Exodus the jew

after a few

feverish tiffs

and reparations

chiefly conveyed in exclamations

— — a means of expression

modified by lack of experience

unite their variance

in marriage

Exodus

Oriental

mad to melt

with something softer than himself

clasps with soothing pledges

his wild rose of the hedges

While she

expecting

the presented knee

of chivalry

repells

the sub-umbilical mystery

of his husbandry

— hysterically

His passionate anticipation

of warming in his arms

his rose to a maturer colouration

which was all of aspiration

the grating upon civilization

of his sensitive organism

had left him

splinters upon an adamite

opposition

of nerves like stalactites

This dying chastity

had rendered up no soul — — —

Yet they pursued their congugal

dilemmas as is usual

with people

who know not what they do

but know that what they do

— — is not illegal

Deep in the nevrose

night he

peruses this body

divested of its upholstery

firmly insensitive

in mimicry

of its hypothetical model

a petal

of the English rose

An abstracted Ada

in myopic contemplation

of the incontemplatable

compound rosette

of peerless negations

That like other Gods

has never appeared

leaving itself to be inferred

Whereof

it is not seemly

that the one petal

shall apprehend

of the other petals

their conformity

For of this Rose

— wherever it blows

it is certain

that an impenetrable pink curtain

hangs between it and itself

And in metaphysical vagrance

it passes beyond the ken

of men

unless

possessed

of exorbitant incomes

And Then⁠—

merely indicating its presence

by an exotic fragrance

A rose

—that like religions

before

becoming amateur⁠—

enwraps itself

in esoteric

and exoteric

dimensions

the official

and inofficial

social morale

The outer

classes

accepting the official

of the inner — — —

as a plausible

gymnastic

for disciplining the inofficial

“flesh and the devil”

to the ap parent impecca bility

of the Eng — — —

— — — and for

Empire

what form could be superior

to the super-imposed

slivers

of the rose?

The best

is this compressed

all round-and-about⁠—

itself conformation

Never letting out

subliminal infection

from hiatuses

in its sub-roseal skeleton

Its petals hung

with tongues

that under the supervision

of the Board of Education

may never sing in concert — —

for some

singing h

flat and some

h sharp “The Arch

angels sing H”

There reigns a disproportionate

dis’armony

in the English Hanthem

And for further information

re the Rose⁠—

and what it does to the nose

while smelling it

— — See Punch

Mongrel Rose