10 - lawrence ferlinghetti

10
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti


          I have not lain with beauty all my life
                  telling over to myself
                                               its most rife charms

     I have not lain with beauty all my life
                                             and lied with it as well
                  telling over to myself
                                     how beauty never dies
                     but lies apart
                                  among the aborigines
                                                             of art
                       and far above the battlefields
                                                             of love

               It is above all that
                                       oh yes
        It sits upon the choicest of
                                            Church seats
   up there where art directors meet
to choose the things for immortality
                                                And they have lain with beauty
                              all their lives
                                            And they have fed on honeydew
        and drunk the wines of Paradise
                                                   so that they know exactly how
   a thing of beauty is a joy
         forever and forever
                                   and how it never never
              quite can fade
                                into a money-losing nothingness

   Oh no I have not lain
                               on Beauty Rests like this
       afraid to rise at night
                               for fear that I might somehow miss
some movement beauty might have made
     Yet I have slept with beauty
                                           in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
                                                    with beauty in my bed
   and so spilled out another poem or two
        and so spilled out another poem or two
                                                     upon the Bosch-like world