Indignation Jones by Edgar Lee Masters — Read

You would not believe, would you, / That I came from good Welsh stock?

That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?

And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders / And Virginians of Spoon River?

You would not believe that I had been to school / And read some books.

You saw me only as a run-down man, / With matted hair and beard / And ragged clothes.

Sometimes a man's life turns into a cancer / From being bruised and continually bruised, / And swells into a purplish mass, / Like growths on stalks of corn.

Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life / Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow, / With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter, / Whom you tormented and drove to death.

So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days / Of my life.

No more you hear my footsteps in the morning, / Resounding on the hollow sidewalk, / Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal / And a nickel's worth of bacon.