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In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain.
Does it rain in Spain?
Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights.
The dancers dance in long white pants
It isn’ t right to yence your aunts
Come Uncle, let’ s go home.
Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.
Come let us fart in the home.
There is no art in a fart.
Still a fart may not be artless.
Let us fart an artless fart in the home.
Democracy.
Democracy.
Bill says democracy must go.
Go democracy.
Go

Your mother’ s in the kitchen and out
and in again. It’ s all about them.

They’ ve taken over like the dark cloud
hanging low over the back yard,

a fat aunt coming in for a hug.
Enough’ s enough. The door opens:

new guests flow in as the old
back you up like mangroves.

Why get dressed up to stay in?
Pretend to befriend other children

because they have been dumped next to you?
Resistance, then fire, then to your room

without toys. Later, it’ ll be the boys
to whom your friends will cater,

We are descending again in parallel —
I cannot say together — as in another dream

you rushed through the first door
without me. It was late. Your name

was an elevator door resisting its rail,
its screech my only attempt to reach you.

Was it the hurt that filled the elevator
I entered with gurneys and gowned girls,

incubated hearts pumping for a home?
Floors flicker as they fall.

The girls’ chatter flaps shrill at light,
tangles in my hair and away

Various stars. Various kings.
Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights.
Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers,
Much cold, much overbearing darkness.

Various long midwinter Glooms.
Various Solitary and Terrible Stars.
Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers.
Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.

The houses those suburbs could afford
were roofed with old savings books, and some
seeped gravy at stitches in their walls;

some were clipped as close as fury,
some grimed and corner-bashed by love
and the real estate, as it got more vacant,

grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called
for the exquisite lanterns of its seed,
and the land sagged subtly to a low point,

They gave the city a stroke. Its memories
are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.

Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century
and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget

now squares with another. If the word is Manchester
it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.

To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload
of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.

One and one make two,
the literalist said.
So far they've made five billion,
said the lateralist, or ten
times that, if you count the dead.

A sycamore on either side
In whose lovely leafage cried
Hushingly the little winds —
Thus was Mary’ s shrine descried.

“Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four”
Legended above the door,
“Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray
For our souls,” — and nothing more.

Builded of rude gray stones and these
Scarred and marred from base to frieze
With the shrapnel’ s pounces — ah,
Fair she braved War’ s gaunt disease:

And yet we should consider how we go forward.
To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move
nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole
when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls.