Anthology

Let’s get out of here, you and I
(while the evening is spread out against the sky—
and, you know, patient etherized upon a table,
muttering retreats, one-night cheap hotels, oyster shells),
and while we run, shall I compare you to a summer’s day?
You are more lovely and more innocent
than a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water
and the blood of innocence; sing your song
of sixpence, your queenliness, and bake your pie
to be sold by the little goblin men with their whiskers
and their rat tails, so that the hollow men, the stuffed men
may shamble down and, raging against the light’s dying,
may take their pies with them as they climb Mt. Fuji,
losing pieces of themselves, but slowly, slowly.
Do I contradict myself? No, I don’t, it’s just that
my vast multitudes are smarter than your vast multitudes,
so you can never hope to comprehend my world
of etherized, shambling, snail-like rat-tailed hollow men
whose world will end
in both fire and ice, slowly,
not with a bang but with a whimper.

[With many, many apologies to T.S. Eliot, Bill Shakespeare, Christina Rosetti, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Issa. (William Carlos Williams is in there too but in my opinion he deserves anything he gets.)]