g, anarchy,
it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start
with
because it was all myself.

When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself
plucking my own flowering.
When I went in a train, I knew it was myself
travelling by my own invention.
When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened
with my own ears to my own destruction.
When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own
torn dead body.
It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh.

III

I SHALL never forget the maniacal horror of it all
in the end
when everything was me, I knew it all already, I
anticipated it all in my soul
because I was the author and the result
I was the God and the creation at once;
creator, I looked at my creation;
created, I looked at myself, the creator:
it was a maniacal horror in the end.

I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved,
and God of horror, I was kissing also myself.
I was a father and a begetter of children,
and oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving
in my own body.

IV

AT last came death, sufficiency of death,
and that at last relieved me, I died.
I buried my beloved; it was good, I buried
myself and was gone.
War came, and every hand raised to murder;
very good, very good, every hand raised to murder!
Very good, very good, I am a murderer!
It is good, I can murder and murder, and see
them fall
the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a multitude
one on another, and then in clusters together
smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps
going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them
the murdered bodies of youths and men in heaps
and heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps
till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps;
thousands and thousands of gaping, hideous foul
dead
that are youths and men and me
being burned with oil, and consumed in corrupt
thick smoke, that rolls
and taints and blackens the sky, till at last it is
dark, dark as night, or death, or hell
and I am dead, and trodden to nought in the
smoke-sodden tomb;
dead and trodden to nought in the sour black
earth
of the tomb; dead and trodden to nought, trodden
to nought.

V

GOD, but it is good to have died and been trodden
out
trodden to nought in sour, dead earth
quite to nought
absolutely to nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing.

For when it is quite, quite nothing, then it is
eve