Poor kind God upon His throne,
Up there in the sky so blue,
Always, always all alone . . .
"~Please, dear God, I pity You.~"




Or else, sitting on the terrace of a cafe on the Boul' Mich',
I sip slowly a Dubonnet or a Byrrh, and the charm of the Quarter possesses me.
I think of men who have lived and loved there, who have groveled and gloried,
who have drunk deep and died. And then I scribble things like this:




Gods in the Gutter



I dreamed I saw three demi-gods who in a cafe sat,
And one was small and crapulous, and one was large and fat;
And one was eaten up with vice and verminous at that.

The first he spoke of secret sins, and gems and perfumes rare;
And velvet cats and courtesans voluptuously fair:
"Who is the Sybarite?" I asked. They answered: "Baudelaire."

The second talked in tapestries, by fantasy beguiled;
As frail as bubbles, hard as gems, his pageantries he piled;