Aldous Huxley

Complaint of a Poet Manqué

We judge by appearance merely:
   If I can’t think strangely, I can at least look queerly.
   So I grew the hair so long on my head
   That my mother wouldn’t know me,
   Till a woman in a night-club said,
   As I was passing by,
   “Hullo, here comes Salome ...”
 
   I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass,
   And, oh Salome; there I was—
   Positively jewelled, half a vampire,
   With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily
   Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire
   Over the brink of the crag of sense,
   Looking down from perilous eminence
   Into a gulf of windy night.
   And there’s straw in my tempestuous hair,
   And I’m not a poet: but never despair!
   I’ll madly live the poems I shall never write.
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