Explore "We Want Lyrics" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Thousands of faces break / To one word called dramatic: / Thousands of faces attain / An over-worked, realistic / Clash of stupidities. / At first the mob spreads out / Its animated fights of lines -- / Butcher with a face one degree / Removed from the dead flesh which he cuts; / Socialist whose face rebukes / The cry for justice tumbling from his lips; / Five professors of English / Whose faces are essentially / School-boys coerced by erudition; / Bank-clerk with a face / Where curiosity / Weakly contends against.
/ The shrewd frown brought by counting slips of money; / Girls whose first twenty years / Have merely shown them the exact / Shade of pouting necessary / For the gain of price-marked objects; / Boys with cocksure faces / Where an awkward lyric / Wins the vitriol of civilization; / Shop-girl whose face is like / The faint beginning of a courtezan / Prisoned by the trance of unsought labor; / Wealthy man whose face / Holds a courteous, bored / Reply to traces of imagination; / Housewife with a round / Face where dying disappointments / Flirt with hosts of angel-lies; / Old men with faces where a psychic doubt / Invades the ruins of noses, lips, and eyes / And dreams of better structures; / Old woman with a face / Like a bashful rag-picker / Rescuing bits of cast-off deviltries / Beneath the ebbing light of eyes.