ManicDDaily

At a Bar Where they’ve Read Some Eliot

So, I says to that wreck of an Archduke, I says,
hurry up please it’s time.

and he says to me, leaning across the bar, belly dragging through these slimy stumps
of vegetation ( why he don’t eat the olives, I just
don’t know) 
jug jug jug jug tereu–

and I says, I’m Madame
to you; I don’t care what
they says at Kew.

But then he gets so quiet–one of  those frosty
silences–I couldn’t even get a chirp,
so, I says, at last, what you need man,
is some water,
and on the rocks, he shouts,
(and even then I have to hold it
to his lips–
swallow swallow)

only in a flash, he goes
all mad again, breaking into some deep
sea shanty
mixed with London Bridge–

and if this is how
the unguented live—
cause I tells you he still did smell good
under the gin–
let me stick
to my people, the humble
people.  (One has to be
so careful these days.)

******************

17th draft poem for April.  This belated for Angie’s prompt on With Real Toads, to write an upbeat poem based on words for Eliot’s The Waste Land.  I’m in a real rush today so posting much re-cycled pic–supposed to be based on Prufrock.   Thanks.