greatpoetry | what i want

Stumbled across this one last night while conducting random phrase searches through a poetry archive. A friend I shared it with assessed it very simply: "Oooh. Hot damn."

From "Villa Stellar"
by George Barker

'But what I want,' said the Contessa, 'is a word like a
perfectly commonplace rose. I am sick of the bouquets
of broken mirrors and barbed wire and rubber bladders containing
specimens of someone else's intellectual urine
mitigated, if one is lucky, by only the faintest odour
of a self abjuring its pity. I am quite sick of
the honesty that insists upon gurgitating into my lap
simply because I am sitting here. I am also
profoundly mistrustful of an amoral despair so
always accessible that, like a phone by a bedside,
it accrues a debt it does not propose to pay.
This debt is the price of that self-indulgence enjoyed by
those for whom their despair is like financing an opera
to be performed in the privacy of the boudoir or
as I say, a telephone line directly connected to the
tomb of the absconded god. My dear, write me a word or
two like a perfectly commonplace rose, for
in the course of a long life I have not yet encountered
a rose that could whimper.'