Rosemary Tonks Poems

I swear that I would not go back
To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies
That built the Earth - there, under the heavy trees
...

We talk openly, and exchange souls.
Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!
The same double life among the bores and vegetables,
...

Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
...

What a night! My past is very close.
Dark rag-and-satin April in the city
Moves its water lily breezes, one by one. My fading letters!
My café-au-lait sentences that groaned for love and money.
...

No, this is not my life, thank God...
...worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;
Obsessed first by one person, an then
(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another:
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I insist on vegetating here
In motheaten granduer. Haven't I plotted
Like a madman to get here? Well then.
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I have lived it , and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.
...

His search is desperate!
And the little night-shops of the Underworld
With their kiosks...they know it,
The little bars as full of dust as a stake cake,
None of these places would exist without Orpheus
And how well they know it.
...

I shall fill up that pit inside me
With my gloomist thoughts; and then
Spread myself, prostrate, inert, on top of them.
...

Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one,
For if you mix with the rong people
- And you yourself may be one of the wrong people -
If you make love to the wrong person.
...