Capricornus, or, The Goat

Supervises over the teatable our voluble hostess

The passing round of titterings and toasties.

Her glass-eyed friends, confidence's make-and-breaks,

Give each in series gobbets of another's cakes.

Dough drips into their tight triangular shoes.

Their mouths give vent to evil-smelling news

Keep their minds pure, make mental products crisper,

With speaking eyeball rolls and the not too improper whisper.

Fawn-eyed, the daughter, a gossip apprentice,

Festoons gilt malice on her unmalicious twenties.

Holiday smarmed the manureminded ephebus

Sees in every skirt lubricity's rebus.

Sex is their unknown god, with neither purity nor pox,

To whom they genuflect whenever they enjoy their shocks.

A little of everything, is the note they strike,

The only limitation, what they think they do not like.

Always they suffer inexpressible injustices,

Making their own beds, these amateur Procrusteses,

But expect their maids to lie in them. The middle classes

Must have some defence against the vulgar masses.

They have no use for idle gossips that scarify:

But in their own leisure get together to verify

Rumours of rationalists, use of contraceptives,

Probable bastards, hope of their proving defectives

(Details being perquisites of good detectives).

This of course for the parish's sake. These long nose weevils

Seek knowledge of others', as expression of their own, evils:

And naught escapes being twisted and messed,

Their own souls included, on matters of interest.

Ignorant, superficial, malignant, self-deceived,

Ashamed to bear, but proud to be bereaved,

Devoted to truth's medals, but dismayed to see its flesh—

Babies are born to them in prams and crêches.

Lip-honouring peace, by their indignant whispers

Others they desecrate, their own insure, in their smug vespers.

At mattins for their own sins pray to be forgiven,

Revelling in others while walking home from heaven.

Martrylike suffer for transgressions of the parish,

Or say they do, particularly the most garish.

But humbly at their bedside never hope that Jesus has destroyed

Others' misfortunes wholly, lest themselves be unemployed.

Such and so balsting are their faded Joys

Which Time, nor Sickness, never quite destroys.

Balder and balder every haircut

Cutting a caper as lewd as he dare cut,

Quasiphilosophically Capricorn carouses

Ill at ease in such respectable houses,

The disinherited soul of an atrabilious

Semi self-deprecating paterfamilias.

With many eyeglitters at women's legs in stockings

And at the schoolboys' furtive corybantic eyecockings,

His Bacchanalian belly he wobbles like a sack

with metaphysical justification as Dionysiac,

And ungenteel jokes undoubtedly due to his strabismus

Distorting even the quaint festivities of Christmas.

Remembering in the artificial afternoon

Old days when Pan his saxophonic tune

Under the ilex played, and how the figwood image

Nimbly swayed in the nights of lustful scrimmage,

And how in pleased surprise he uttered several Eurekas

At finding the gross fungus Ithyphallus Impudicus.

With him his father's hair his father's scalp reveals

Commensurate, with scratching too much during silent meals,

With virgin's blood the holly on the wall

Drips. As from Druid branches fail to fall

Light, intense pearl juices from alabaster fitting,

The proper tight-drawn hostess cuts unwitting

Symbols of fertility from Christmas cake. All jollity

Is fastened down. Only innocent frivolity

Saturnalia is allowed in houses of good quality.

Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. The door bursts open wide

The Sunday china stands up horrified.

Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. All he has ever remembered

Bulges out like a plaster panel badly distempered.

Tiddledywog. Meh, membrum caprinum erexit:

Culpabat, alia aliam, quia ipsa conspexit.

Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog.

First he puts under the mat Persian cat and Pekinese dog.

Then the tables' and chairbacks' torselling

Smashes, and piles on potsherds of Worcester porcelain.

Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Forefeet dangling like clappers

Dancing about he grips the frightened flapper's

Flaxen coils, throws to the ground and violates her.

Which done she becomes he: he hates her,

And turning on the boy, knocks his eyes out,

Strips him, and using sinewy tail as a knout

Flogs the boy till he eddies and faints. And the mother faints,

Whom Capricorn props up upon the chintz

And bathing her forehead with cold milk and tea

Reverses coldness that used to be.

But when she recovers, recovers himself and batters

The woman to death. This seems to mend matters.

Next pausing somewhat incommoded by his toils,

The carpets, cushions, colour schemes he soils.

Last in fierce memory of dislocate desire

The house itself he dislocates with fire.

Scatters the redhot imitation coals

Over this mortuary of human souls.

The imitation furniture goes up in smoke<

And well fired china serves as admirable coke.

Like wood distilled that dribbles clammily

Oozes the ectoplasm of his burning family.

Various vermicular disseminations

Germinating from his character's past emanations,

Wriggle until he tramples them. This action

Causes him an electric satisfaction.

But as he leaves the drawing-room for the servants' hall

To seize the housemaid ere the whole place fall

He, bleating with dismay, or recognition rather,

Finds himself facing himself as his own father.

Incestuous terror tempts him to do patricide:

But this he cannot, lest it turn out suicide:

So forfeiting this chance of lovely pain,

Since man once killed can not have joy of killing self again,

And since the air is gradually overheating,

With slight discomfort in his merry bleating,

A muffler from the hall veiling him from being stark,

He leaves the house to meditate, quite decent, in the Park.

Attend the coda. Hardly out he passes

Ere the charred, smashed, cadaverous wilting masses,

Shape back to chintz and gilded wood and scones.

The ancient house of Capricorn & Sons

Stands unassailable in statu quo,

Unconscious of the wiles of wurrico.

Immaculate the virgin hopes her stare

Has an enlightened but offended air:

The boy unscarred eyes still the cakes and knees

Smiling as sticky as the things he sees:

The hostess volubly goes prattling on

Deadly and regular as Gatling gun:

With spurious teeth and with triangular feet

The friends tread on each other's corns and eat:

While Capricorn, morose from losing od,

Defends the Empire and the Will of God.

Copyright Credit: Joseph Gordon Macleod, "Capricornus, or, The Goat" from The Ecliptic. Copyright © Copyright © 1930, 2016 by The Estate of Joseph Gordon Macleod. Reprinted by permission of Flood Editions.

Source: The Ecliptic (Flood Editions., 2016)