About Eve
Give me a woman bare as a boiled egg,
Who'd think a brush and comb came from the divvle,
Who owns no snotrag to entrap her snivel,
Or towel or dishcloth hanging from a peg,
Who has no shoe on foot or hose on leg
Nor any of the Amenities of Civil-
Ised Life, to use the advertiser's drivel.
No jakes to thrutch in and no pot to deg,
Who will sup water but not sit in it
Nor on a chair nor underneath a roof,
Who'll never see the muckman do his duty.
Picture this little lady decked in shit
From hair to heel, then try to give me proof
That Mother Eve, Christ help us, was a beauty.
But some say: Scorn her not. Remember, she,
When Adam took her, did not turn her face
But drank the dreadful fire of his embrace.
Dirty or not, without her where would we
Be? She merits homage. So, with me:
"O ave Eva, though full of disgrace,
We love thee as the root of all our race;
Thy sap runs in us, leaves of thy living tree."
Dirty? How do we know? Perhaps her skin
Was laved in a miraculous hygiene,
Just as the second Eve was laved within.
Not that it matters. For myself, I lean
To lauding both her sordor and her sin.
Without those to wash off, who could be clean?
Greed
Which of the seven deadly sins is worst?
Pride sneering skyward, avarice shrieking
More, Liplicking lust, or anger, one red roar?
No, gluttony, the fifth sin, is the first.
From Adam burst a famine and a thirst
For a wormy apple offered by a whore,
A penny pippin. God has rammed its core
Down all our throats, a canker of the cursed.
That bitch, that bastard. God, I gape aghast as
I contemplate the greed that could have cast us
Into the outer darkness – fed us, rather,
To final fire. But our ingenious master's
As quick to cancel as to cause disasters,
And to this end kindly became a father.
The sceptic beats his brain till dawn's first dapple
Lights him and all his books to slumber's amity.
Though he's read all from Moses to Mohamet, he
Rejects the truth of temple, mosque and chapeclass="underline"
That man brought sin and death and hell to grapple
His soul in irons, condemning God to damn it. He
Set up an aboriginal calamity
Or, if you like, munched a forbidden apple.
Why why why? One song, too many singers.
Why why? Why won't unwrite the bloody book.
So let them write a new one if they must.
Why why? We want an answer. They can look
In Milo Aphrodite's clutching fingers
Or up the arsehole of Pasquino's bust.
Knowledge
Before they yielded to the devil's urging
And crunched the good-bad apple to the core,
Bare innocence was all our parents wore,
Like Jesus Christ got ready for the scourging.
After their second gorge they felt emerging
A thing called shame. So rapidly they tore
Leaves from the trees to cover what before
Had been mere taps for secondary purging.
Thus good and evil, as we must conclude,
Succeed in making rude and crude and lewd
The dumpendebat and the fhairy grot.
Else why should man and missis play the prude?
Each knew, however leafily endued,
Precisely what the other one had got.
There'd be, if Adam hadn't sold our stock,
Preferring disobedience to riches,
No sin or death for us poor sons of bitches.
Man would range free, powerless to shame or shock,
And introduce all women to his cock,
Without the obstacles of skirt and breeches,
Spreading his seed immeasurably, which is
To say: all round the world, all round the clock.
The beasts would share the happy lot of men,
Despite a natural plenitude of flies.
There'd be no threats of Doomsday coming when
Christ must conduct the dreadful last assize.
Instead, the Lord would look in now and then,
Checking our needs, renewing our supplies.
A Problem
I'm puzzled. (Bear with me. Father Superior.)
If Adam's gorging had not been the means
Of turning us to compost for the beans
– Nothing more useful, yes, but nothing drearier -
And all who issue from their dam's interior
Did not end up by pushing up the greens,
Now what would be finale to those scenes
Which start with bouts of murderous hysteria?
Ah but (you say) along with immortality
There'd be no urge to sin: remember this.
Thank you. And so – predestinate causality
And no free will (but Adam had it: yes?).
What puzzles me is: would I incur fatality
If I fell down a fucking precipice?
We sinners have to eat four times a day
Or, if we happen to be English, five.
But man unfallen would have stayed alive.
If not a single crumb had come his way.
And even if they'd served him on a tray
Boiled stones, mashed mud, garnished with poison iv-
Y, he'd survive – indeed, contrive
To thrive on shit like any flower of May.
Everyone thin, carting an empty belly
About, knowing no gustatory bliss
In wine or trout or grouse in aspic jelly;
With jam a joke and fowl farci a farce.
The tongue and teeth for talk, yes; but why this
Hole, O ye holy buggers, up the arse?
Cain 1
"Cain, where is Abel?" Silence. "Cain, Cain, where
Is Abel?" Silence. "Cain!" Then came Cain's cry:
"Shoving your nose in. How the fuck should I
Know where he is? Or, for that matter, care?
Am I my brother's keeper?" The high air
Darkened at this, shuddered at God's reply:
"I'll tell you where, you killer – done in by
Your knife, he's pushing up those parsnips there.
Out of my sight, start running, up and down
The whole damned earth, you damned, you cursed, and cry
Through every bloody street of every town.
Howl, you unchristian swine, your dismal tune
Hurl at the stars, then shiver in the sky,
Weep till you brim the pockholes of the moon."
Please don't think, Herr Professor, I intend
Defending Cain. Better than you, perhaps,
I know him, but know too the sort of lapse
Drink will induce – how it can blind and bend
And break. See Cain drunk, beckoning like a friend,
Thick stick in fist, an oiled smile on his chaps,
Wooing his brother hither. Then he taps,
Raps bone, draws blood, the swine, and makes an end.
Filthy? Oh, yes. Still, it was far from funny
Having to hear God hawking up his phlegm
To spit upon his parsnips and his honey
But not on Abel's sheep, no, not on them.
Born of the breed of men and not of mice,
Cain growled revolt then cut himself a slice.
Cain 3
Reproach him not for bidding crime begin.
Evil was what he sucked in from his mother.
The murder of his innocent young brother
Derived from something deep beneath the skin.
As two and two make four, so man makes sin.
Still, there's a nagging problem tough to smother:
How did he know when one man cracks another