Oh, that was a more innocent time, a more innocent world,
I can’t dispute it, when it was possible to turn my collar up
against the weather and put a cigarette between my lips,
my hands cupped around the match—I was ready, then,
for some adventure, for some of those drug-store prophecies,
for some foray into the street or down to the pool hall,
or later, with those horrifically sad bar-girls in their
bright silk skirts, always hustling drinks, always trying
to get me upstairs. No gaiety about this, just the cigarette
against my tongue, the blue smoke curling up past one eye
or the other, and sometimes the wonderful lace of opium,
or even when I used to just pinch the desolate roach of a joint
into the end of a Camel and walk through the park, smoking,
high, the civil twinge in my lungs. What happened? All those
times have collided now, without any gist or sequence,
and dreams, too, wear their deceptive coats and shoes and
sit like perfect guests on the stuffed chairs and sofas—no one
can sift the first real thing from any other real thing, surely
I can not with my drifty nostalgia, which I excuse in myself
but would probably not forgive in you or any of your friends.
But am I not justified? You stoop after beauty, only beauty,
pure beauty—and where does that leave you? Isn’t it written
that on a specified day every prophet will be ashamed of his vision?
That’s how it was from the beginning. Aren’t you tired of a language
that takes no risks, spoken by persons who have taken no risks?
Weren’t you the one trying to make out signs in the feeble streetlight,
in the gauzy rain? Yes, the tough girls, the lovely boys, the rage,
all that business they always called love. And me with my
cigarette, the tip sweet in my bitter mouth, and that match just struck
in its sulfur and its brashness, that match in my fingers, flaring.