“From my father.”
“Where did he get it?”
“From his father.”
“And where did he get it?”
“He fought for it.”
“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”
38
Have you seen men handed refusals
till they began to laugh
at the notion of ever landing a job again—
Muttering with the laugh,
“It’s driving me nuts and the family too,”
Mumbling of hoodoos and jinx,
fear of defeat creeping in their vitals—
Have you never seen this?
or do you kid yourself
with the fond soothing syrup of four words
“Some folks won’t work”??
Of course some folks won’t work—
they are sick or wornout or lazy
or misled with the big idea
the idle poor should imitate the idle rich.
Have you seen women and kids
step out and hustle for the family
some in night life on the streets
some fighting other women and kids
for the leavings of fruit and vegetable markets
or searching alleys and garbage dumps for scraps?
Have you seen them with savings gone
furniture and keepsakes pawned
and the pawntickets blown away in cold winds?
by one letdown and another ending
in what you might call slums—
To be named perhaps in case reports
and tabulated and classified
among those who have crossed over
from the employables into the unemployables?
What is the saga of the employables?
what are the breaks they get?
What are the dramas of personal fate
spilled over from industrial transitions?
what punishments handed bottom people
who have wronged no man’s house
or things or person?
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Machines, land, buildings, are property, yes.
A job is property,
no, nix, nah nah.
The rights of property are guarded
by ten thousand laws and fortresses.
The right of a man to live by his work—
what is this right?
and why does it clamor?
and who can hush it
so it will stay hushed?
and why does it speak
and though put down speak again
with strengths out of the earth?
39
There have been thousands of Andy Adams
only Andy was one of the few who had the words.
“Our men were plainsmen and were at home
as long as they could see the North Star.”
They got his drift when he laughed:
“Blankets? Never use them. Sleep on your belly and
cover it with your back and get up with the
birds in the morning.
“Saddles? Every good cowman takes his saddle
wherever he goes though he may not have
clothes enough to dust a fiddle.”
They could ride long hours in rain and sleet dozing
and taking short sleeps in their saddles, resting
to linger over their morning coffee.
This breed of men gone to a last roundup?
They will be heard from.
They tell us now any Texas girl is worth marrying.
“No matter what happens, she has seen worse.”
In oak and walnut
Those old New England carpenters hoisted and
wrought.
Sunup till sundown they hoisted and wrought in
oak and walnut.
Wood had a meaning and wood spoke to the feel of
the fingers.
The hammer handles and the handwrought nails
somehow had blessings.
And they are gone now? their blood is no longer
alive and speaking?
They no longer come through telling of the hands
of man having craft?
Let their beds and staircases, chairs and gables now
lingering testify:
The strong workman whose blood goes into his
work no more dies than the people die.
“I’m holding my own,”
said more than one pioneer.
“I didn’t have anything
when I landed here
and I ain’t got anything now
but I got some hope left.
I ain’t lost hope yet.
I’m a wanter and a hoper.”
40
“We live only once.”
Of course the people buy great big hump-backed
double-jointed fresh-roasted peanuts at ten
a sack folks ten a sack—
Of course the people go to see the greatest
aggregation of concatenated curiosities and
monstrosities ever assembled beneath one
canvas—
Of course they enjoy the oily slant-eyed spieler
with his slick bazoo selling tickets and gabbing
One at a time please One at a time,
and inside the tent Tom Thumb and Jumbo,
the hippodrome charioteers, the clowns and
tumblers, the lighted pink moment when a
lithe woman is flung into empty air from
one flying trapeze to another.
“We live only once.”
Of course the greatest showman on earth who
excused himself with saying, “The people
love to be humbugged,” was himself humbugged
and lost the first of his fortunes to
the fate that humbugged him out of it.
Do this, buy now, go here,
stand up, come down, watch
me and you will see I have
nothing up my sleeve and I
merely execute a twist of
the wrist and a slight motion
of the hand. Do this,
buy now, go here, plans,
programs, inventions, promises,
games, commands, suggestions,
hints, insinuations, pour
from professional schemers
into the ears of the people.
41
“Why did the children
put beans in their ears
when the one thing we told the children
they must not do
was put beans in their ears?”
“Why did the children
pour molasses on the cat
when the one thing we told the children
they must not do
was pour molasses on the cat?”
42
Why repeat? I heard you the first time.
You can lead a horse to water, if you’ve
got the horse.
The rooster and the horse agreed not to
step on each other’s feet.
The caterpillar is a worm in a raccoon
coat going for a college education.
The cockroach is always wrong when it
argues with the chicken.
If I hadn’t done it Monday somebody
else would have done it Tuesday.
Money is like manure—good only when
spread around.
You’re such a first-class liar I’ll take a
chance with you.
A short horse is soon curried.
A still pig drinks the swill.
Small potatoes and few in a hill.
A fat man on a bony horse: “I feed myself—
others feed the horse.”
No peace on earth with the women, no
life anywhere without them.
Some men dress quick, others take as<
br />
much time as a woman.
“You’re a liar.” “Surely not if you say
so.”
He tried to walk on both sides of the
street at once.
He tried to tear the middle of the street
in two.
“When is a man intoxicated?” “When he
tries to kiss the bartender good-night.”
“He says he’ll kick me the next time we
meet. What’ll I do?” “Sit down.”
He’s as handy as that bird they call the
elephant.
Now that’s settled and out of the way
what are you going to do next?
“From here on,” said the driver at an
imaginary line near the foothills of
the Ozarks, “the hills don’t get any
higher but the hollers get deeper
and deeper.”
So slick he was his feet slipped out from
under him.
The ground flew up and hit him in the
face.
Trade it for a dog, drown the dog, and
you’ll be rid of both of them.
There’ll be many a dry eye at his funeral.
“Which way to the post-office, boy?”
“I don’t know.” “You don’t know
much, do you?” “No, but I ain’t
lost.”
43
When we say fresh eggs we mean fresh.
Buying or selling strictly fresh eggs we mean
strictly.
If eggs are guaranteed extra special what more
could be asked?
A rotten egg can’t be spoiled and a shrewd
buyer knows an asking price from a selling
price.
Why do they say of some fellows, “He knows
all about the Constitution and the price
of eggs”?
Eggs offered as plain and ordinary means as
eggs they are not bad.
The egg market punster noted of one buyer,
“He dozen’t eggsspect eggs specked.”
Eggs spotted or dirty of course are priced
accordingly.
Broken eggs can never be mended: they go
in a barrel by themselves.
What sort of an egg are you ??
Just today or yesterday someone was saying
you are a good egg or a bad egg or not-
so-bad or hard to classify.
Under a microscope Agassiz studied one egg:
chaos, flux, constellations, rainbows:
“It is a universe in miniature.”
44
Why should any man try to find the distance to the moon by guessing half way and then multiplying by two?
To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking glass.
The new two dollar a day street-sprinkler driver took his job so serious he went right on driving while the rain poured down.
“What! you saw a man drowning and didn’t help him?” “Well, he didn’t ask me to.”
“Help! help! I’m drowning.” “Tuesday is the day I help the drowning and I’ll be here Tuesday.”
“The peacock has a beautiful tail,” said the other birds. “But look at those legs! and what a voice!”
The farther up the street you go the tougher they get and I live in the last house.
There’s only two in the country and I’m both of ’em.
I can live without you in the daytime but oh when that evening sun goes down it’s nighttime that’s killing me.
When the hotel waitress saw the traveling man eat fourteen ears of corn-on-the-cob one summer noon in the horse-and-buggy days, she asked, “Don’t you think it would be cheaper for you to board at a livery-stable?”
The fresh young hotel clerk pulled a fast one on the internationally famous scientist who asked if they had an Encyclopaedia Britannica in the house: “No, we haven’t, but what is it you’d like to know?”
The degree B.B.D.P.B.B.B. means Big Bass Drum Player Boston Brass Band.
The letter of recommendation read, “This man worked for me one week and I am satisfied.”
If he had a little more sense he’d be a half-wit.
He opened his mouth and put his foot in it.
“Do you think it will rain?” “Be a long dry spell if it don’t.”
“Got enough, sonny?” “No, but I’ve got down to where it don’t taste good any more.”
Yesterday’s hits win no runs today.
Nothing is so dead as yesterday’s newspaper.
Do right by any man and don’t write any woman.
The best throw of the dice is to throw ’em away.
“Give me something to eat,” grinned a hobo. “I’m so thirsty I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight.”
“When he whittles toward him he’s in good humor, but let him alone when he cuts the other way,” they said of a Union Stockyards pioneer.
“And now,” said the justice of the peace, “by the authority of the State of Wisconsin in me vested I do hereby pronounce you man and woman.”
“Don’t analyze me—please,” the stenographer pleaded. “Sometimes when I think about you I’m afraid my heart will strip a gear.”
45
They have yarns
Of a skyscraper so tall they had to put hinges
On the two top stories so to let the moon go by,
Of one corn crop in Missouri when the roots
Went so deep and drew off so much water
The Mississippi riverbed that year was dry,
Of pancakes so thin they had only one side,
Of “a fog so thick we shingled the barn and six feet out on the fog,”
Of Pecos Pete straddling a cyclone in Texas and riding it to the west coast where “it rained out under him,”
Of the man who drove a swarm of bees across the Rocky Mountains and the Desert “and didn’t lose a bee,”
Of a mountain railroad curve where the engineer in his cab can touch the caboose and spit in the conductor’s eye,
Of the boy who climbed a cornstalk growing so fast he would have starved to death if they hadn’t shot biscuits up to him,
Of the old man’s whiskers: “When the wind was with him his whiskers arrived a day before he did,”
Of the hen laying a square egg and cackling, “Ouch!” and of hens laying eggs with the dates printed on them,
Of the ship captain’s shadow: it froze to the deck one cold winter night,
Of mutineers on that same ship put to chipping rust with rubber hammers,
The People, Yes Page 7