Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
This is a property of type Text.
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<div class="poem">
<p>Lured with their compelling logic, charmed with beauty of their verse, <br />
With their loaded sideboards whispered ‘Better join us, life is worse.’
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago; <br />
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Yours you say were parents to avoid, avoid then if you please <br />
Do the reverse on all occasion till you catch the same disease.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Squeeze into the works through broken windows or through damp-sprung doors; <br />
See the rotted shafting, see holes gaping in the upper floors;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>These were boon companions who devised the legends for our tombs, <br />
These who have betrayed us nicely while we took them to our rooms.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Newman, Ciddy, Plato, Fronny, Pascal, Bowdler, Baudelaire, <br />
Doctor Frommer, Mrs Allom, Freud, the Baron, and Flaubert.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving like a stone: <br />
Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Or, in friendly fireside circle, sit and listen for the crash <br />
Meaning that the mob has realized something’s up, and start to smash;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Run the whole night through in gumboots, stumble on and gasp for breath, <br />
Terrors drawing close and closer, winter landscape, fox’s death;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Hope and fear are neck and neck: which is it near the course’s end <br />
Crashes, having lost his nerve; is overtaken on the bend?
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try; <br />
If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Lawrence, Blake and Homer Lane, once healers in our English land; <br />
These are dead as iron for ever; these can never hold our hand.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Taught us at the annual camps arranged by the big business men <br />
‘Sunbathe, pretty till you’re twenty. You shall be our servants then.’
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Lawrence was brought down by smut-hounds, Blake went dotty as he sang, <br />
Homer Lane was killed in action by the Twickenham Baptist gang.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires; <br />
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Far from there we spent the money, thinking we could well afford, <br />
While they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>On the sopping esplanade or from our dingy lodgings we <br />
Stare out dully at the rain which falls for miles into the sea.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Intimate as war-time prisoners in an isolation camp, <br />
Living month by month together, nervy, famished, lousy, damp.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town, <br />
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.
</p>
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