Dylan Thomas Holding Forth at His Regular Table by Rose Mary Boehm

Dylan Thomas by Augustus John.

Dylan Thomas Holding Forth at His Regular Table*
a found poem

“Reuben Mednikoff? For a poet
he is a bloody good painter.

I know David Gascoyne is only
a kid. But what are the boys coming to?
He's raving mad. There are more
maggots in his brain
than there are in mine.
There’s just no hope.

Without wishing to provide a pornographic interlude
over the pub-table, here are some
of his actual lines:

White curtains of tortured destinies
Encourage the waistlines of women to expand
And the eyes of men to enlarge like pocket cameras
Teach children to sin at the age of five
To cut out the eyes of their sisters with nail-scissors.

Ugliness and eccentricity
must have a purpose.

Our Sunday referee literary whippets
indulge in a horrid compromise between
the romanticist and the galumphing
of the dogmatic theorist.

In my mind the compromise is between
beer and no beer: a muse is never drunk enough
to be really emotional and never sober enough
to be truly intellectual.”

* from his letters, 1933

Rose Mary Boehm