The Ice-Cream Room Towns Poem by Rosemary Tonks

Hurry: we must go south to escape
The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts,
You, with your career, toad-winner, I with my intolerance.
The English seacoast is more oafish than a ham.


We can parade together softly, aloof
Like envoys in coloured clothes - on the promenades,
The stone sleeping-tables where the bourgeois bog down,
And the brilliant sea swims vigorously in and out.


There will be hot-house winds to blunt themselves
Against the wooden bathing-huts, and fall down senseless;
Lilos that swivel in the shallow, iced waves, half-submerged;
Skiffs - trying to bite into a sea that's watertight!


One whiff of it - careerist - and we fall down senseless,
Bivouacked ! Your respirating, steep, electric head,
Filled by its nervous brakdown, will slumber narcotized
By the clear gas that trembles in the sandpit.


Under the pier will be an overdose of shadows - the Atlantic
Irrigates the girders with enormous, disembodied cantos,
Unless you're quick - they pull the clothes off your soul
To make it moan some watery, half-rotten stanzas.


Night! The plasterboard hotels that rattle shanty bedrooms
On the front, are waiting! Without gods, books, sex or family,
We'll sink to a vast depth, and lie there, musing, interlocked
Like deportees who undulate to phosphorescent booming.