Evening Prayer

I spend my life sitting - like an angel in the hands of a barber - a deeply fluted beer mug in my fist, belly and neck curved, a Gambier pipe in my teeth, under the air swelling with impalpable veils of smoke.

Like the warm excrements in an old dovecote, a thousand dreams burn softly inside me, and at times my sad heart is like sap-wood bled on by the dark yellow gold of its sweats.

Then, when I have carefully swallowed my dreams,

I turn, having drunk thirty or forty tankards, and gather myself together to relieve bitter need:

As sweetly as the Saviour of Hyssops and of Cedar I piss towards dark skies, very high and very far; and receive the approval of the great heliotropes.