O hideous little bat, the size of snot, 
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes, 
To populate the stinking cat you walk 
The promontory of the dead man?s nose, 
Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe 
The smoking mountains of my food 
And in a comic mood 
In mid-air take to bed a wife. 


Riding and riding with your filth of hair 
On gluey foot or wing, forever coy, 
Hot from the compost and green sweet decay, 
Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy? 
You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool, 
In the tight belly of the dead 
Burrow with hungry head 
And inlay maggots like a jewel. 


At your approach the great horse stomps and paws 
Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail; 
Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand 
Which sweeps against you like an angry flail; 
Still you return, return, trusting your wing 
To draw you from the hunter?s reach 
That learns to kill to teach 
Disorder to the tinier thing. 


My peace is your disaster. For your death 
Children like spiders cup their pretty hands 
And wives resort to chemistry of war. 
In fens of sticky paper and quicksands 
You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck 
You struggle hideously and beg, 
You amputate your leg 
Imbedded in the amber muck. 


But I, a man, must swat you with my hate, 
Slap you across the air and crush your flight, 
Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood, 
Expose your little guts pasty and white, 
Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard?s hat, 
Pin your wings under like a crow?s, 
Tear off your flimsy clothes 
And beat you as one beats a rat. 


Then like Gargantua I stride among 
The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust, 
The broken bodies of the narrow dead 
That catch the throat with fingers of disgust. 
I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls 
And stunned, stone blind, and deaf 
Buzzes its frightful F 
And dies between three cannibals.