The Dust Dance

Selections, Version II

The sin and jest of the times am I

Since destiny’s dance began,

When the weary gods from the dews and sods

Made me and named me man.

Ah, it’s little they knew when they molded me

For a pawn of their cosmic chess,

What a mummer wild, what an insane child

They fashioned from nothingness!

For I with the shape of my kin the ape

And the soul of a soaring hawk,

I fought my way from the jungles grey

Where the hunting creatures stalk.

I champ my tusks o’er beetles and husks,

I tear red meat for my feast;

The pulse of the earth is in my mirth

And the roar of the primal beast.

By a freak of fate through the whirling spate

Of the uncouth roaring years,

Red taloned I came from the tribal flame

And the trails beside the meres.

Back of my eyes a tiger lies,

Savage of claw and tooth;

Close at my heels the baboon steals

Barren of pity and ruth.

And, ah, I know as I bellow so

With my foolish bloody mirth,

That the soul of the tree is the soul of me

And things of the physical earth.

For I was made from the dust and the dew,

The dawns, the dusk and the rain,

The snow and the grass and when I pass

I’ll fade to the dust again.

For I know that all of the platitudes

That we hear from birth to youth

Slink from the backs of the brazen facts,

The reign of talon and tooth.

From the ghostly gleam of a vagrant dream,

From the shade of a wheeling bat,

From a passion-haunted vision told

In the huts where the women sat,

I wove the skein of a Hell aflame–

And it passed from breath to breath–

And paradise beyond the skies

Against the day of my death.

I roared my glee to the sullen sea

When Abel’s blood was shed;

My jeer was loud in the gory crowd

That stoned St. Stephen dead.

I laughed when Nero’s minions sent

Fire-tortured souls to the sky;

Without the walls of Pilate’s halls

I shouted “Crucify!”

Sin of Adam was brother to me,

My zeal is passion shod,

Bearing red brands in the heathen lands

To teach them the word of God.

Sages speak of my brother love,

No love, in truth, I lack

As I hang them free from the gallows tree

And shatter them on the rack.

Seek me not in the drawing rooms

For music and light are there,

And I cloak the lusts of my blood-red soul

With culture’s gossamer.

Look for me by the gibbet tree

Where a saintly hero dies,

And the jeer of each knave that he sought to save

Goes up to the naked skies.

Seek my face in a shadowy place

Where the evil torches gleam

And flesh with flesh in Satan’s mesh

Mingles in lurid dream.

Let sages speak, I know the reek

Of the battlefields of earth,

The musk of the jungle is in my breath,

The tiger roar in my mirth.

The brazen realities are mine

And I laugh at dreams and rime,

For I am a man of the primal years

And a laughing slave of Time.