A Psalm of Labouring Life

TEL

ELL me not, in doctored numbers,
Life is but a name for work!

For the labour that encumbers

Me I wish that I could shirk.

Life is phony! Life is rotten!
And the wealthy have no soul;
Why should you be picking cotton?
Why should I be mining coal?

Not employment and not sorrow
Is my destined end or way;
But to act that each to-morrow
Finds me idler than to-day.

Work is long, and plutes are lunching;
Money is the thing I crave;
But my heart continues punching
Funeral time-clocks to the grave.

In the world's uneven battle,
In the swindle known as life,
Be not like the stockyards cattle-
Stick your partner with a knife!

Trust no Boss, however pleasant!
Capital is but a curse!

Strike, strike in the living present!
Fill, oh fill, the bulging purse!

A Psalm of Labouring Life

Lives of strikers all remind us

We can make our lives a crime, And, departing, leave behind us Bills for double overtime.

Charges that, perhaps another,
Working for a stingy ten

Bucks a day, some mining brother
Seeing, shall walk out again.

Let us, then, be up and striking,
Discontent with all of it;
Still undoing, still disliking,
Learn to labour-and to quit.

Ballade of Ancient Acts

AFTER HENLEY

HERE are the wheezes they essayed

Wand where the smiles they made to

flow?

Where's Caron's seltzer siphon laid,
A squirt from which laid Herbert low?
Where's Charlie Case's comic woe
And Georgie Cohan's nasal drawl?
The afterpiece? The olio?

Into the night go one and all.

Where are the japeries, fresh or frayed,
That Fields and Lewis used to throw?
Where is the horn that Shepherd played?
The slide trombone that Wood would blow?
Amelia Glover's 1. f. toe?

The Rays and their domestic brawl?
Bert Williams with “Oh, I Don't Know?”
Into the night go one and all.

Where's Lizzie Raymond, peppy jade?
The braggart Lew, the simple Joe?
And where the Irish servant maid
That Jimmie Russell used to show?
Charles Sweet, who tore the paper snow?
Ben Harney's where? And Artie Hall?
Nash Walker, Darktown's grandest beau?
Into the night go one and all.

To a Prospective Cook

L'ENVOI

Prince, though our children laugh "Ho! Ho!" At us who gleefully would fall

For acts that played the Long Ago,

Into the night go one and all.

CUR

To a Prospective Cook

URLY Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be ours?

Thou shalt not wash dishes, nor yet weed the flowers,

But stand in the kitchen and cook a fine meal, And ride every night in an automobile.

Curly Locks, Curly Locks, come to us soon! Thou needst not to rise until mid-afternoon; Thou mayst be Croatian, Armenian, or Greek; Thy guerdon shall be what thou askest per week.

Curly Locks, Curly Locks, give us a chance! Thou shalt not wash windows, nor iron my pants.

Oh, come to the cosiest of seven-room bowers, Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be ours?

N

June 30, 1919.

TOTABLY fond of music, I dote on a clearer tone

Than ever was blared by a bugle or zoomed by a saxophone;

And the sound that opens the gates for me of a Paradise revealed

Is something akin to the note revered by the blesséd Eugene Field,

Who sang in pellucid phrasing that I perfectly well recall

Of the clink of the ice in the pitcher that the boy brings up the hall.

But sweeter to me than the sparrow's song or the goose's autumn honks

Is the sound of the ice in the shaker as the barkeeper mixes a Bronx.

Between the dark and the daylight, when I'm worried about The Tower,

Comes a pause in the day's tribulations that is known as the cocktail hour;

And my soul is sad and jaded, and my heart is a thing forlorn,

And I view the things I have written with a sickening, scathing scorn.

Oh, it's then I fare with some other slave who is hired for the things he writes