Explore "Intimate Scene" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Bed-room, you have earned / The sympathy of dirt, / And bear upon your air / Malevolent and thwarted / Essences of men. / Many contorters of bellies / Have stirred an urgent travesty / Shielded by your greasy dusk, / And hearts have found upon your couch / A brief, delicious insult. / Cheap room within a lodging-house, / You are not merely space / For the coronation of flesh, / And your odorous bed-quilts / Need not only provoke / The casual jeering of thought.
/ II. Woman and her master / Close the door too quietly. / With a mien of slinking / Insecurity, the woman turns / Within the dangling darkness of the room / And mumbles orders to her man. / Anticipation and disgust / Rout each other upon her face. / Then the gas-light brings / Its feeble understanding to the room. / Woman and man slump down / Within the chairs and regard / The tired amens of their feet. / For a time weariness / Banishes the theatrical / Divisions of masculine and feminine, / But returning strength / Calls to the untrue drama. / The man demands, with practised expectation, / Money squeezed from an automatic night; / Curses at the smallness of the sum, / And cuffs his woman without intensity, / Desiring only an excuse / For the slowness of his mind.