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I unearthed a little brothel in the spring of forty-three, It was captained by a midwife who was ninety years of age She produced a little bottle saying ghoulishly to me: ‘you must try this new elixir, it is all the fucking rage’   I awoke a fortnight later at a clinic underground Where the patients all were painters, and they’d each consumed a pin And when one was called to surgery his friends would gather round With their brushes at the ready, to paint ‘life beneath the skin’   When the skinner-boys discovered I had swallowed no such pin They concealed some in my dinners, and although I had no proof I was forced to give up eating and I soon became so thin That I fled the washy dungeon through a cat flap in the roof   I emerged in a cathedral with a wedding in full swing, And I sprinted down the middle (like a batsman up the crease) And by chance I reached the altar (with the timeliness of spring) At that moment when the vicar says ‘forever hold his peace’   I surveyed the gloomy couple with a piercing, hungry look; It was clear he was a bastard and that she belonged with me, So I clambered up the pulpit and I opened up the book And declared the marriage ‘filthy’ using Jeremiah, 3   All the bridal guests were cheering but the others were aghast So I grabbed my new fiancée adding slickly ‘stick with me’, And the armies of relations started fighting as we passed, Clashing rashly into combat like the closing of a sea   We were wedded in the crow’s-nest of a galleon in Goole Which we sailed to Vladivostok through a melted Arctic sea In the prow there was theatre, in the stern there was a school And in all the