, words,
Pattering like hail,
Like hail falling without aim...
Egos rampant,
Screaming each other down.
One motions perpetually,
Waving arms like overgrowths.
He has burning eyes and a cough
And a thin voice piping
Like a flute among trombones.

One, red-bearded, rearing
A welter of maimed face bashed in from some old wound,
Garbles Max Stirner.
His words knock each other like little wooden blocks.
No one heeds him,
And a lank boy with hair over his eyes
Pounds upon the table.
--He is chairman.

Egos yet in the primer,
Hearing world-voices
Chanting grand arias...
Majors resonant,
Stunning with sound...
Baffling minors
Half-heard like rain on pools...
Majestic discordances
Greater than harmonies...
--Gleaning out of it all
Passion, bewilderment, pain...

Egos yearning with the world-old want in their eyes--
Hurt hot eyes that do not sleep enough...
Striving with infinite effort,
Frustrate yet ever pursuing
The great white Liberty,
Trailing her dissolving glory over each hard-won barricade--
Only to fade anew...

Egos crying out of unkempt deeps
And waving their dreams like flags--
Multi-colored dreams,
Winged and glorious...

A gas jet throws a stunted flame,
Vaguely illumining the groping faces.
And through the uncurtained window
Falls the waste light of stars,
As cold as wise men's eyes...
Indifferent great stars,
Fortuitously glancing
At the secret meeting in this shut-in room,
Bare as a manger.

VIII

Lights go out
And the stark trunks of the factories
Melt into the drawn darkness,
Sheathing like a seamless garment.

And mothers take home their babies,
Waxen and delicately curled,
Like little potted flowers closed under the stars.

Lights go out
And the young men shut their eyes,
But life turns in them...

Life in the cramped ova
Tearing and rending asunder its living cells...
Wars, arts, discoveries, rebellions, travails, immolations,
cataclysms, hates...
Pent in the shut flesh.
And the young men twist on their beds in languor and dizziness
unsupportable...
Their eyes--heavy and dimmed
With dust of long oblivions in the gray pulp behind--
Staring as through a choked glass.
And they gaze at the moon--throwing off a faint heat--
The moon, blond and burning, creeping to their cots
Softly, as on naked feet...
Lolling on t