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I I SEARCH the room with all my mind, | |
| Peering among those eyes; | |
| For I am feverish to find | |
| A brain with which my brain can talk. | |
| Not that I think myself too wise, | 5 |
| But that I’m lonely, and I walk | |
| Round the large place and wonder. No— | |
| There’s nobody, I fear, | |
| Lonely as I, and here. | |
| |
| How they must hate me! I’m a fool: | 10 |
| I can’t play bridge; I’m bad at pool; | |
| I cannot drone a comic song; | |
| I can’t talk shop; I can’t use slang; | |
| My jokes are bad, my stories long; | |
| My voice will falter, break, or hang, | 15 |
| Not blurt the sour sarcastic word— | |
| And so my swearing sounds absurd. | |
| |
II But came the talk: I found | |
| Three or four others for an argument. | |
| I forced their pace. They shifted their dull ground, | 20 |
| And went | |
| Sprawling about the passages of thought. | |
| We tugged each other’s words until they tore. | |
| They asked me my philosophy: I brought | |
| Bits of it forth and laid them on the floor. | 25 |
| They laughed, and so I kicked the bits about, | |
| Then put them in my pocket one by one— | |
| I sorry I had brought them out, | |
| They grateful for the fun. | |
| |
| And when those words of ours had thus been sent | 30 |
| Jerking about like beetles round a wall, | |
| Then one by one to dismal sleep we went. | |
| There was no happiness at all | |
| In that short hopeless argument | |
| Through yawns and on the way to bed | 35 |
| Among men waiting to be dead. | |
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