Explore "Track-Workers" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ The rails you carry cut into your hands, / Like the sharp lips of an unsought lover. / As you stumble over the ties / Sunlight is clinging, yellow spit / Raining down upon your faces. / You are the living cuspidors of day. / Dirt, its teasing ghost, dust, / And passionless kicks of steel, fill you. / Flowers sprouting near the tracks, / Brush their lightly odoured hands / In vain against your stale jackets of sweat. / Within you, minds and hearts / Are snoring to the curt rhythm of your breath. / You do not see this blustering blackbird / Promenading on a barbed-wire fence. / He eyes you with spritelike hauteur, / Unable to understand / Why your motions endlessly copy each other, / One of you, a meek and burly Pole, / Peers a moment at the strutting blackbird / With a fleeting shade of dull resentment. / There is always one among you / Who recoils from glimpsing corpses.