When did you start your tricksMonsieur?
What do you stand on such high legs for?Why this length of shredded shankYou exaltation?
Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwardsAnd weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?
I heard a woman call you the Winged VictoryIn sluggish Venice.You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.
How can you put so much devilryInto that translucent phantom shredOf a frail corpus?
Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legsHow you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,A nothingness.
Yet what an aura surrounds you;Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:Invisibility, and the anæsthetic powerTo deaden my attention in your direction.
But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.
Queer, how you stalk and prowl the airIn circles and evasions, enveloping me,Ghoul on wingsWinged Victory.
Settle, and stand on long thin shanksEyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,You speck.
I hate the way you lurch off sideways into airHaving read my thoughts against you.
Come then, let us play at unawares,And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.Man or mosquito.
You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist.Now then!
It is your trumpIt is your hateful little trumpYou pointed fiend,Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.
Why do you do it?Surely it is bad policy.
They say you can't help it.
If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.But it sounds so amazingly like a sloganA yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.
Blood, red bloodSuper-magicalForbidden liquor.
I behold you standFor a second enspasmed in oblivion,Obscenely ecstasiedSucking live bloodMy blood.
Such silence, such suspended transport,Such gorging,Such obscenity of trespass.
You staggerAs well as you may.Only your accursed hairy frailtyYour own imponderable weightlessnessSaves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.
Away with a pæan of derisionYou winged blood-drop.Can I not overtake you?Are you one too many for meWinged Victory?Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?
Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makesBeside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!
Siracusa.
