The Fly
O hideous little bat, the size of
snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby
clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you
walk
The promontory of the dead man’s
nose,
Climb with the fine leg of a
Duncan-Phyfe
The smoking
mountains of my food
And
in a comic mood
In mid-air take
to bed a wife.
Riding and riding with your filth
of hair
On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,
Hot from the compost and green
sweet decay,
Sounding your buzzer like an urchin
toy—
You dot all whiteness with
diminutive stool,
In the tight
belly of the dead
Burrow
with hungry head
And inlay maggots
like a jewel.
At your approach the great horse
stomps and paws
Bringing the hurricane of his heavy
tail;
Shod in disease you dare to kiss my
hand
Which sweeps against you like an
angry flail;
Still you return, return, trusting
your wing
To draw you from
the hunter’s reach
That
learns to kill to teach
Disorder to the
tinier thing.
My peace is your disaster. For your
death
Children like spiders cup their
pretty hands
And wives resort to chemistry of
war.
In fens of sticky paper and
quicksands
You glue yourself to death. Where
you are stuck
You struggle
hideously and beg,
You
amputate your leg
Imbedded in the
amber muck.
But I, a man, must swat you with my
hate,
Slap you across the air and crush
your flight,
Must mangle with my shoe and smear
your blood,
Expose your little guts pasty and
white,
Knock your head sidewise like a
drunkard’s hat,
Pin your wings
under like a crow’s,
Tear
off your flimsy clothes
And beat you as
one beats a rat.
Then like Gargantua I stride among
The corpses strewn like raisins in
the dust,
The broken bodies of the narrow
dead
That catch the throat with fingers
of disgust.
I sweep. One gyrates like a top and
falls
And stunned,
stone blind, and deaf
Buzzes
its frightful F
And dies between
three cannibals.
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