The Glum Reply

Indeed you say you’d choose that oyster’s life,

And you mention a crop of things that charmed you

In passing, like the shell-rills and the pearl,

And now assume a tranquil sort of shine

Upon your well-timed slumber.


In doing so you let your lot encumber

Your energy in reaching down to mine,

We have an upstream current too –

Sometimes we’re cornered, we are snagged

In bursts of fits of moving a to b…


Regarding your non-gains, I cannot see

That you’re so short on aspiration – after all

You’ve ordered me. But just in morsel form;

Your passionate passionlessness will yet depart.


And you’re so sure I cannot reel off art,

And only am it? I drive me quite hard,

Hard enough to know what regret is, what work’s not.


You know your way about a wide shore-length

That’s no use to me where I brood my jewel,

Where every image is a sludge of grit,

And one that sphincter-tears and carves in and distorts, mars, sours,

This art that is production, that must be, that pulses me an exact mile

And half from all prodigal’s lies. You and your homage and your…


I can be realist and not be dour,

I can grind through the dirt and shine the more,

I can be pretty but no piece you seek –


You, with your round of boring sparkle, reek,

I don’t dislike you and I’ll hear you out,

But don’t think listening now redeems a thing,

And don’t think my glint isn’t just innate,

Or that your extended and misread splashed

Attempt at sight doesn’t make me more than irked.


The view you shirked,

Like a slept-out lecture – no I don’t play –

And this is what I’ve said before, you know,

I grant you you are near your pile’s

Arid circlet. We will speak again,

But it’s not thinking that you’re well out of now.

The pair of us shall never really talk.