3

The rest of you can eat me up
I just record your behaviour!
For you they'll find dining tables
to lay you out. This desk for me!

Because I've been happy with little
there are foods I've never tasted.
The rest of you dine slowly.
You've eaten too much and too often.

Places are already chosen
long before birth for everyone.
The place of adventure is settled,
and the places of gratification.

Truffles for you not pencils.
Pickles instead of dactyls
and you express your pleasure
in belches and not in verses.

At your head funeral candles
must be thick-legged asparagus:
surely your road from this world
will cross a dessert table!

Let's puff Havana tobacco
on either side of you then;
and let your shrouds be made
from the finest of Dutch linen.

And so as not to waste such
fine cloth let them shake you
with left-overs and crumbs
into the grave that waits for you

Your souls at the post mortem
will be like stuffed capons.
But I shall be there naked
with only two wings for cover.

1933-5