Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call the House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics

Our earth in 1969
Is not the planet I call mine,
The world, I mean, that gives me
To hold off chaos at arm’s length.
My Eden landscapes and their clim

Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis,
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year,

Certainly our city with its byres
The river’s edge, its cathedral, i
Here is the cosmopolitan cooking
And the light alloys and the glass
Built by the conscience-stricken,

This is the night mail crossing th
Bringing the cheque and the postal
Letters for the rich, letters for
The shop at the corner, the girl n
Pulling up Beattock, a steady cli

Deftly, admiral, cast your fly
Into the slow deep hover,
Till the wise old trout mistake an
Salt are the deeps that cover
The glittering fleets you led,

Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts to-day,
That brought us to a room
Cavernous, lofty as
A railway terminus,

Not as that dream Napoleon, rumou
Before who’s riding all the crowds
Who dedicates a column and withdra
Nor as that general favourite and
To whom the weather and the ruins

When shall we learn, what should b
We cannot choose what we are free
Although the mouse we banished yes
Is an enraged rhinoceros today,
Our value is more threatened than

On this day tradition allots
to taking stock of our lives,
my greetings to all of you, Yeasts
Bacteria, Viruses,
Aerobics and Anaerobics: