Bed-room, you have earned
The sympathy of dirt,
And bear upon your air
Malevolent and thwarted
Essences of men.
Many contorters of bellies
Have stirred an urgent travesty
Shielded by your greasy dusk,
And hearts have found upon your couch
A brief, delicious insult.
Cheap room within a lodging-house,
You are not merely space
For the coronation of flesh,
And your odorous bed-quilts
Need not only provoke
The casual jeering of thought.
II
Woman and her master
Close the door too quietly.
With a mien of slinking
Insecurity, the woman turns
Within the dangling darkness of the room
And mumbles orders to her man.
Anticipation and disgust
Rout each other upon her face.
Then the gas-light brings
Its feeble understanding to the room.
Woman and man slump down
Within the chairs and regard
The tired amens of their feet.
For a time weariness
Banishes the theatrical
Divisions of masculine and feminine,
Calls to the untrue drama.
The man demands, with practised expectation,
Money squeezed from an automatic night;
Curses at the smallness of the sum,
And cuffs his woman without intensity,
Desiring only an excuse
For the slowness of his mind.
She is not a composition
Waiting for its orchestra of pain:
His fists can merely give
An inexpensive spice
To the apathy within her.
Soon the man and woman laugh,
To kill an inner jumble of sounds
Which they cannot separate—
Nightly complaint of their souls.
He pinches one of her cheeks,
Like an Emperor deigning
To test the softness of a bauble,
And she finds within his fingers
An endurable compliment.
When morning light exposes
Each deficiency within the room,
Man and woman open their eyes.
Hallucination of fire
No longer streams over the moving screens.
Woman and her man
Stare, with disapproval, at the walls,
And their souls become
Querulous captives almost gaining lips.
Then emotional habits
Revive the earthly hoax.
Rising from the bed,
Man and woman use their voices
Reassuringly.