I'LL kick your walls to bits, I'll die scratching a tunnel, <br />If you'll give me a wall, if you'll give me a simple stone, <br />If you'll do me the honour of a dungeon— <br />Anything but this tyranny of sinews. <br />Lashed with a hundred ropes of nerve and bone <br />I lie, poor helpless Gulliver, <br />In a twopenny dock for the want of a penny, <br />Tied up with stuff too cheap, and strings too many. <br />One chain is usually sufficient for a cur. <br />Hair over hair, I pick my cables loose, <br />But still the ridiculous manacles confine me. <br />I snap them, swollen with sobbing. What's the use? <br />One hair I break, ten thousand hairs entwine me. <br />Love, hunger, drunkenness, neuralgia, debt, <br />Cold weather, hot weather, sleep and age— <br />If I could only unloose their spongy fingers, <br />I'd have a chance yet, slip through the cage. <br />But who ever heard of a cage of hairs? <br />You can't scrape tunnels in a net. <br />If you'd give me a chain, if you'd give me honest iron, <br />If you'd graciously give me a turnkey, <br />I could break my teeth on a chain, I could bite through metal, <br />But what can you do with hairs? <br />For God's sake, call the hangman.<br /><br />Kenneth Slessor<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gulliver/
