Explore "To a Friend" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Your head is steel cut into drooping lines / That make a mask satirically meek: / Your face is like a tired devil weak / From drinking many vague and unsought wines. / The sullen skepticism of your eyes / For ever trying to transcend itself, / Is often entered by a wistful elf / Who sits naïvely unperturbed and wise.
/ And this same remnant, with its youthful wiles / Held curiously apart from blasphemies, / Twirls starlight shivers out upon your sneers / And changes them to little, startled smiles. / And all your insolence drops to its knees / Before the half-won grandeur of past years.