Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria

My father and all his tobacco loved you

I love you too in all your forms

The slim unlovely virgin floating among German beards

The mean governess of the huge pink maps

The solitary mourner of a prince

Queen Victoria

I am cold and rainy

I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station

I feel like an empty cast-iron exhibition

I want ornaments on everything

Because my love she gone with other boys

Queen Victoria

Do you have a punishment under the white lace?

Will you be short with her, make her read those little Bibles?

Will you spank her with a mechanical corset?

I want her pure as power

I want her skin slightly musty with petticoats

Will you wash the easy bidet out of her head?

Queen Victoria

I'm not much nourished by modern love

Will you come into my life

With your sorrow and your black carriages

And your perfect memory?

Queen Victoria

The 20th Century belongs to you and me

Let us be two severe giants

(not less lonely for our partnership)

Who discolour test tubes in the halls of science

Who turn up unwelcome at every World's Fair

Heavy with proverb and correction

Confusing the star-dazed tourists

With our incomparable sense of loss