University of Virginia Library

QUEER STREET.

I strolled at random down the street called Queer,
And watched the tenants at their occupations
Or gravitations—
Though these were mainly Beer.
They seemed but careless folks and jolly,
Given up to idle ways and useless things
Or works of folly,
And some were tied to pretty apron strings.
Both sexes there and every age and class
Disported as they chose
And clinked the frequent glass,
Or kissed their neighbours' maids beneath the rose.
All were in trouble,
Which they invoked with quite religious claims
And rendered double
By suicidal aims.
All were at sixes and at sevens,
Unless they played at fives,
And had their own peculiar hells and heavens
But not their proper wives;
They lived on borrowed money
Which they would rather die than pay,
Or buzzed about the alien honey
Which tempted them to stumble more and stray.
None looked before and none behind,
They found the present
Enough and beautiful and pleasant,
And in the passing moment were confined.
From hand to mouth they lived, and tarried
For no wise future or good end
Or the matured and mellow fruit;
But simply loved to splash and spend,
And without service and fair suit
Were married and unmarried,
And doddered down the same sad courses
With wine and women, hounds and horses,
Wrecked now by shadow, now by shoal
And every day with fresh divorces,
Unto the fated goal.
They never thought
And drowned their many cares in drink,
Were vainly sold and vainly bought
And dreamed not of the least production,
Excepting their own self-destruction,
But toppled over the wild brink;
By mocking loves and meteor lights illumed,
Consuming and consumed.
Not one was serious, few were sane,
And all
Turned with each breath of Fashion's weather vane,
They cared not to what dreadful issue of time and tissue,
To the last curtain's fall.