Explore "Mickey M'Grew" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down, / My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money / With which to go away to school, / And my father suddenly needed help / And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up / A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned, / And they hauled me up the seventy feet, / I unhooked the rope from my waist, / And laughingly flung my giant arms / Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower --
But they slipped from the treacherous slime, / And down, down, down, I plunged / Through bellowing darkness!