THE  CENTURY’S  CHILD

My nativity my parents repent

For it interferes with their fecund fun.

In liquescent lust

The dissipated dissolutes

Pair up afresh

For passing pleasures.

No bond endures

Save their lewd licence

Like rabid dogs

And bitches in heat

Locking less than the duration of dogs.

Wasting their seeds

Neither they gather nor garner

Nor do they lay up some straw

In their temporary shed

For me to incubate

And the Magi consider it madness

To follow the orient star

That heralds my accidental birth

As if I was not the king to be

But a bastard burdensome.

The roofs and props

Put up once by some fools

Have now become a tower

Where confusion reigns

That maddens and urges

An avenger insane

To pull down the rotten structure

And set up a city on the plain

Not to preserve the seed

But in the dead of an endless night

To please all passers by

Visiting our quarters

To know our sisters—

Those painted harlots seeking freedom—

And without waiting for a fire from heaven

We aid and abet a conflagration

To engulf all laughing bastards

Enabling none to rise from the dead

Or lay down his life

On a cross futile

And wash away with his blood

The festers of this leprous world.

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