Explore "The Sardonic Arm" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Agitated child, / Listening to the words of clown, / Charlatan, blackguard, clergyman, / And vainly trying to follow their commands / Simultaneously, with legs and arms / Swinging like demented Jehovahs, / The plastic shapelessness of mud / Waits to receive your castigated fevers.
And all the children whose inarticulate / Hearts smashed together make your body -- / The burly, waggish rogue / Paid to dance in your cabarets; / The shoulder-shaking girl / Who mistakes one shiver for immortality; / The roughly earnest gunman / Whose blundering insurrection / Clutches a cool device; / The man whose eyes are coins / Encased in viscous white; / The fox-like politician / Leaping on small prizes in the dark; / The farmer, lending his different costume / To the ox-like patience of earth; / The manual laborers / With minds as minute and obscure as bricks, / And softly prominent hearts; / The factory-girls who try to scold / The murmur of their souls / With one hundred slang phrases -- / All of them will lose / Their imaginary differences / In the lenient refuge of mud.