You know what I mean, Bill—­the tender and delicate mother of lies,
Woman, the devil’s first cousin—­no doubt by the female side. 
The breath of her mouth still moves in my hair, and I know that she lied,
And I feel her, Bill, sir, inside me—­she operates there like a drug. 
Were it better to live like a beetle, to wear the cast clothes of a slug,
Be the louse in the locks of the hangman, the mote in the eye of the bat,
Than to live and believe in a woman, who must one day grow aged and fat? 
You must see it’s preposterous, Bill, sir.  And yet, how the thought of
    it clings! 
I have lived out my time—­I have prigged lots of verse—­I have kissed
    (ah, that stings!)
Lips that swore I had cribbed every line that I wrote on them—­cribbed—­
    honour bright! 
Then I loathed her; but now I forgive her; perhaps after all she was right. 
Yet I swear it was shameful—­unwomanly, Bill, sir—­to say that I fibbed. 
Why, the poems were mine, for I bought them in print.  Cribbed? of course
    they were cribbed. 
Yet I wouldn’t say, cribbed from the French—­Lady Bathsheba thought it
    was vulgar—­
But picked up on the banks of the Don, from the lips of a highly
    intelligent Bulgar. 
I’m aware, Bill, that’s out of all metre—­I can’t help it—­I’m none of
    your sort
Who set metres, by Jove, above morals—­not exactly.  They don’t go to
    Court—­
As I mentioned one night to that cowslip-faced pet, Lady Rahab Redrabbit
(Whom the Marquis calls Drabby for short).  Well, I say, if you want a
    thing, grab it—­
That’s what I did, at least, when I took that danseuse to a swell
    cabaret,
Where expense was no consideration.  A poet, you see, now and then must
    be gay. 
(I declined to give more, I remember, than fifty centeems to the waiter;
For I asked him if that was enough; and the jackanapes answered—­
   Peut-etre. 
Ah, it isn’t in you to draw up a menu such as ours was, though humble: 
When I told Lady Shoreditch, she thought it a regular grand tout
    ensemble.)
She danced the heart out of my body—­I can see in the glare of the lights,
I can see her again as I saw her that evening, in spangles and tights. 
When I spoke to her first, her eye flashed so, I heard—­as I
    fancied—­the spark whiz
From her eyelid—­I said so next day to that jealous old fool of a Marquis. 
She reminded me, Bill, of a lovely volcano, whose entrails are lava—­
Or (you know my penchant for original types) of the upas in Java. 
In the curve of her sensitive nose was a singular species of dimple,
Where the flush was the mark of an angel’s creased kiss—­if it wasn’t
    a pimple. 
Now I’m none of your bashful John Bulls who don’t know a pilau from a
    puggaree
Nor a chili, by George, from a chopstick.  So, sir, I marched into her