Beware, O my dear young men, of going rotten.
It’s so easy to follow suit;
people in their thirties, and the older ones, have gotten
bad inside, like fruit
that nobody eats and nobody wants, so it rots, but is not
forgotten.
Rotten inside, they are, and seething
with small obscenities;
and they whisper it out, and they titter it out,
breathing
among soft amenities,
a vapour of rottenness out of their mouths, like
sewer-stench
wreathing.
And it’s funny, my dear young men, that you in your
twenties
should love the sewer scent
of obscenity, and lift your noses where the vent is
and run towards it, bent
on smelling it all, before your bit of vitality spent
is.
For obscenity, after all, my dear young men
is only mental dirt,
the dirty mind like a urinal again
or a dung squirt;
and I thought you wanted life and experience, dear young
men!
All this obscenity is just mental, mental,
mental,
it’s the village-idiot mind
playing with muck; and I thought you young gents
experimental
were out to find
new life for yourselves and your women,
complemental.
But if obscene village idiots you want to be, then be
it.
But don’t imagine you’ll get
satisfactory experience from it; can’t you see it?
the idiot with his chin all wet
goggling obscenities! If that’s you and your fate, why then, dree
it.