Sooner than you can Water Milk, or Cry Amen

Sooner than you can water milk, or cry Amen, / Darkness comes, psalming, over Cards again; / Some lights go on; some men go out; some men slip in; / Some girls lie down, calling the beer-brown bulls to sin

And boom among their fishy fields; some elders stand / With thermoses and telescopes and spy the sand / Where farmers plough by night and sailors rock and rise, / Tattooed with texts, between the atlantic thighs / Of Mrs Rosser Tea and little Nell the Knock:

One pulls out Pam in Paris from his money-sock; / One, in the bible black of his back, mothy house, / Drinks paraffin and vinegar, and blinds a mouse; / One reads his cheque book in the dark, & eats fish-heads; / One creeps into the Lion Inn to foul the beds;

One, in the rubbered hedges, rolls with a bald liz / Who's old enough to be his mother (and she is); / The grocer lies in ambush in his smelling shop, / Praying for land-girls, and the preacher lies on top; / In snug and public, hunched by the gob-green logs,

The customers are telling what they do to dogs; / The chemist is performing an unnatural act / In the organ loft; and the lavatory is packed.