history

Have you ever heard of lynching in the great United States?
'Tis an awful, awful story that the Negro man relates,
How the mobs the laws have trampled, both the human and divine,
In their killing helpless people as their cruel hearts incline.

Not the heathen! 'Tis the Christian with the Bible in his hand,
Stands for pain and death to tyrannize the weaklings of the land;
Not the red man nor the Spaniard kills the blacks of Uncle Sam,
'Tis the white man of the nation who will lunch the sons of Ham.

'Twas in the year of 1900, and on the 5th of June,
Lord Roberts entered Pretoria in the afternoon;
His triumphal entry was magnificent to see,
The British Army marching behind him fearlessly.

With their beautiful banners unfurled to the breeze,
But the scene didn't the Boers please;
And they immediately made some show of fight,
But at the charge of the bayonet they were put to flight.

The troops, by the people, were received with loud cheers,
While many of them through joy shed joyous tears;

Could he have made Priscilla share
The paradise that he had planned,
Llewellyn would have loved his wife
As well as any in the land.

Could he have made Priscilla cease
To goad him for what God left out,
Llewellyn would have been as mild
As any we have read about.

Could all have been as all was not,
Llewellyn would have had no story;
He would have stayed a quiet man
And gone his quiet way to glory.

But howsoever mild he was
Priscilla was implacable;

This talk about the journalists that run the East is bosh,
We've got a Western editor that's little, but, O gosh!
He lives here in Mizzoora where the people are so set
In ante-bellum notions that they vote for Jackson yet;
But the paper he is running makes the rusty fossils swear,--
The smartest, likeliest paper that is printed anywhere!
And, best of all, the paragraphs are pointed as a tack,
And that's because they emanate
From little Mack.

In architecture he is what you'd call a chunky man,

Oh Lip-Stick Liz was in the biz, That's the oldest known in history;
She had a lot of fancy rags, Of her form she made no myst'ry.
She had a man, a fancy man, His name was Alexander,
And he used to beat her up because he couldn't understand her.
II
Now Lip-Stick Liz she loved her man And she couldn't love no other
So when she saw him with a Broadway Blonde, Her rage she could not smother.
She saw him once and she saw him twice But the third time nearly crazed her,

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

That which we are and shall be is made up
Of what we have been. On the autumn leaf
The crimson stains bear witness of its spring;
And, on its perfect nodes, the ocean shell
Notches the slow, strange changes of its growth.
Ourselves are our own records; if we looked
Rightly into that blotted crimson page
Within our bosoms, then there were no need
To chronicle our stories; for the heart
Hath, like the earth, its strata, and contains
Its past within its present. Well for us,
And our most cherished secrets, that within

New Castle, July 4, 1878

or a hundred years the pulse of time
Has throbbed for Liberty;
For a hundred years the grand old clime
Columbia has been free;
For a hundred years our country's love,
The Stars and Stripes, has waved above.

Away far out on the gulf of years--
Misty and faint and white
Through the fogs of wrong--a sail appears,
And the Mayflower heaves in sight,
And drifts again, with its little flock
Of a hundred souls, on Plymouth Rock.

either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you

when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.
I had bad blood, a twisted
mind, a precarious
upbringing.

I was hard as granite, I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.

I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--
And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,