Explore "Rosie Roberts" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I was sick, but more than that, I was mad / At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life.
So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria:
"I am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River, / Gradually wasting away.
But come and take me, I killed the son / Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou's, / And the papers that said he killed himself / In his home while cleaning a hunting gun --
Lied like the devil to hush up scandal, / For the bribe of advertising.
In my room I shot him, at Madam Lou's, / Because he knocked me down when I said / That, in spite of all the money he had, / I'd see my lover that night. "