When, Like a Running Grave

by Dylan Thomas

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down, Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs, Love in her gear is slowly through the house, Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse, Hauled to the dome, Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age, Deliver me who, timid in my tribe, Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape Of the bone inch, Deliver me, my masters, head and heart, Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin, When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time Drive children up like bruises to the thumb, From maid and head, For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove, Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye, I, that time’sjacket or the coat of ice May fail to fasten with virgin o In the straight grave, Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force, My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime, Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain On fork and face. Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool. No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer Descends, my masters, on the entered honour. You hero skull, Cadaver in the hanger Tells the stick, ‘fail’. Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam, The cancer’s fusion, or the summer feather Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever, Nor city tar and subway bored to foster man through macadam. I damp the waxlights in your tower dome. Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift, Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state, Sir, is your doom. Everything ends, the tower ending and, (Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene, Ball of the foot depending from the sun, (Give, summer, over), the cemented skin, The actions’ end. All, men my madmen, the unwholesome sind With whistler’s cough contages, time on track Shapes in a cinder death; love his trick, Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take The kissproof world.