Poetry Friday

Kit Marlowe to Cabell
By Joseph T. Shipley
Published in The Double Dealer, Feb. 1923.

Pastels are diffident. Play a carmine, bold
Across the sheets. Blood, man; pour blood!
Have you any in you?
Life's not a questing for will-o'-the-wisps,
Delicate, flitting a lure;
Life is a lust, a fever;
Life burns at both ends.
..... You speak of a veil with twenty-seven slits;
Life tears veils aside.

..... Have you ever waited, on a stormy night of spring,
Fallen foul of a maid, and bundled her,
A delicious squirming squealing petticoat,
To a cosy bed,
Tousled and tussling, only half afraid,
But able now to cry she was unwilling --
Have you ever fought all comers for a maid?

..... When were you drunk last, James?
Have you ever reeled, rollicking, damning the state,
Spun a corner -- into the arms of the law?
You and a pal or two, and for a lark
Muzzled the watch and borne their lanterns off
And stopped all honest citizens on their way
And bunked them in a stable for the night?
List me your pranks; I'll match them double-time,
Or hang my tail upon the tavern-port
For gulls to twit.

..... Man's love of woman is the least of life --
Like food, perhaps, but no more imminent;
Man builds his world on lust of gold or power.
Fashion a harem where a king may loll,
Anthony, Heliogabalus.
And the people writes -- but let the king grow wroth,
Let him sweep conquering over continents,
Alexander, Caesar, or our own great king,
And patriots run to die to clear his way.

..... You pick me (thanks, friend), out of a many more
And say I am the true economist.
How Moll would laugh, if she caught the praise,
Dangling my empty purse from her finger-tip
And pouting for silk hose to match her garters!
My life, you say, was spent wisely. Did I wear
A cloak whose pattern was my choosing? Wish
The way I went? I burned across my years
Like any guzzler on the Mermaid bench
Who drank and fought and whored to kill King Time.
..... There is a fellow here; love's labors' lost
Indeed ('twas a play he wrote) trying to fuddle him.
We mock him when he sips his sober glass
And holds back from out boisterous company --
What a world of fun he misses -- yet I know
That had I held myself like him, the flame
That flares in me might be a steady glow
Through decades --
..... Did you see the wench that passed
The window, turned her eye this way -- just now?
Rare-fashioned for these parts, icod! is my
Feather flaunting? I'll be after her;
It's April since I've kissed as fair a face.
Don't smile, you humbug; but I saw her first,
You have no claim. One word before I go:
Match me a Tamerlane with Kennaston,
Pit Jurgen to my Faustus; strike the flint;
Stir in their bowels the search man never ends,
And I have lusty life where you have -- love.
Damme! I'll lose her 'less I hurry off.
Smear carmine on your pages, James. Farewell.