 LACERATED GRAY HAS BITTEN INTO YOUR SHAPELESS HUMILITY. LITTLE EPISODES OF ROVINGS TRUE THEIR HIROGLIFICS ON YOUR MUTANESS. LIFE HAS GIVEN YOU HEAVY STAINS, LIKE AN OITMENT GROWING STALE. INLESS FEET TAP OVER YOU WITH A MANIAC INSISTANCE. O UNRESISTING STREET PAVEMENT, KEEP YOUR PASSIVE INSULANCE AT THE DWARFS WHO SCORN YOU WITH THEIR FEET. ONLY ONE WHO LIES UPON HIS BACK CAN DISREGARD THE STARS. INTO POEM, THIS RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DEMain. ADVICE TO A BUTTERCUP BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM. Read for LibreVox.org by Sarah Brown. Undistinguished Buttercup, lost among myriads of others. To the red ant eyeing you, you are giant stillness. He pauses on the boulder of a clawed, baffled by your nearness to the sky. But to the black loam at your feet, you are the atom of a pent-up dream. Undistinguished Buttercup, take your little breath of contemplation. Undisturbed by haughty tricks of space. INTO POEM, THIS RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DEMain. ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAM BOAT BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM. The brass band plays upon your decks, like a sturdy harlot aping mirth. And people in starched shields stuff their passions with sweet words. Life is swishing in the air, like a tipsy unseen bridegroom. A humbly grunting riverboat, take the churning water and the sun, like one who plays with his own chains and flings their turmoil to the sky. Only a voice can leap above high walls. INTO POEM, THIS RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DEMain. FOUNDARY WORKERS BY MAXWELL BODENHEIM. RED FOR LIBREVOX BY APRIL 6-0-9-0, California, United States of America. Foundry workers, brown faces twisted back into an ecstasy of tight resistance. Eyes that are huge, sweat drops unheated by the struggle underneath them. Throughout the night you stagger under walls, where life is squeezed to squealing bitterness. Beneath your heaving flash of limbs, your thoughts are smashed to a dejected trance. And you are swept, like empty mites, into a glistening frenzy of motion. Yet, on a Sunday afternoon, I have seen you straightening your backs with slow smiles, walking through the streets and patiently groping for lost outlines. Your lips were placid bruises, almost fearing to relax, and often out upon some green your legs swung themselves into long-lost shapes. Perhaps upon your deathbeds you will lift your hands, with a wreath of grace showing life a last, weak curve of the rhythm he could not kill. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Today have vanished to you who squat and watch years loosen one sand grain until it fall becomes your moment. Tall things plunge over you, slashing their dreams with motion, that holds the death of all they seek, but you, to whom fierce winds are ripples, do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness. Horned toad of cloven brown, never hop from your gray rock crevice, with interwoven beginnings and ends. The fluid lies of motion leave no remembrance behind. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Slipping down the road in twilight robes. O trees whose leaves make an insensitive sound, reeling with the bead of your caught feet. Do not mingle your tips with startled hatred when little men come to fell you. These men will saw you into strips of pointed brooding, blind with paint. But underneath you, men will chase the grace to cut off their lives, down a glaring maze of walls much harder than your own. And when at last the deep brown gaze of stolidly emmer's time steals you, the little men who bid into your hearts will stray off in a patter of rabbit's feet. Look down upon these children then with the aloof and weary tolerance that all still things possess. O trees to whom the darkness was a child, scampering in and out of your long green beards. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. To him the sky seemed an angelic pasture stripped to phantom tranquility where one could nibble thoughtfully. He longed to leave his mild furtiveness and speak to a boldness puzzled by his flesh. With one long circle of despairing grace he flashed into the air, leaping toward his heaven. But down he crashed against a snake who ate him with a meditative interest. From that day on the snake was filled with little meek whispers of concern. The crushed and peaceful rabbit stream cast a groping hush upon his blood. He curled inertly on a rock in cryptic wilted savageness. In the end his dry gray body was scattered out upon the rock like a story that could not be told. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Advice to a Bluebird by Maxwell Bodenheim. Read for LibriVox.org by Sarah Brown. Who can make a delicate adventure of walking on the ground? Who can make grass blades arcades for partly careless straying? You alone who skim against these leaves, turning all desire into light whips, molded by your deep blue wingtips. You who shrill your unconcern into the sternly antique sky. You to whom all things hold an equal kiss of touch. Men sing wanton bluebird grimace at the hoofs of passing men. You alone can lose yourself within a sky and rob it of its blue. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Advice to a friend by Maxwell Bodenheim. Your head is steel cut in drooping lines that make a mask satirically meek. Your face is like a tired devil weak. From drinking many vague and unsought wines, the silent skepticism of your eyes, forever trying to transcend itself, is often entered by a wistful elf who sits naively unperturbed and wise. And this same remnant, with its youthful wiles, held curiously apart from blasphemies, twirls starlight shivers out upon your sneers and changes them to little, startled smiles. And all your insolence drops to its knees before the half-one grandeur of past years. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Life to you is a liquid mirror. You stand with delicate perpetual amazement, vainly seeking your reflection. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. August sauntered down the mountainside, dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay. The air was like an old priest, disrobing without embarrassment before the dark and candid gaze of night. But these things brought no pause to the sossily determined squirrel. His eyes were hungrily upturned to where the stars hung, icily clustered nuts dotting trees of solitude. He saw the stars just over the horizon, and they seemed to grow on trees that he could reach. So he scampered on, from branch to branch, wondering why the fairy-nut trees ran away from him. But, looking down, he spied a softly wild-cheeked mountain-pool, and there a handful of fairy-nuts bit into the indigo cupping them. With a squeal of weary happiness, the squirrel plunged into the mountain-pool, and, as he drowned within its soundless heart, the fairy-nuts were jigging over him, like the unheard stirring of a poem. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Aimless petal of the wind spinning gently weird circles. To the flowers underneath you are a drunken king of motion. To the plunging winds above you are momentary in decision. Aimless petal of the wind waver carelessly against this dune. The universe, like you, is but the drowsy arm of stillness spinning gently weird circles in his sleep. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Advice to a pool by Maxwell Bodenheim. Be a liquid threshold for the dawn, and let night touch you with his back. The earth-bowl prisoning you and cold night winds are only pause and rhythm within an endless fantasy, but you, like they, can be a dream from the loins of a dream, and build a golden stairway of escape. O coolly unperturbed pool, slap your ripples and laughter at men who splash you with their lordly hands. Time is but a phantom dagger, then motion lifts to slay itself. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. When Fools Dispute by Maxwell Bodenheim. Read by Wes Freeman. A trickle of dawn insinuated itself through the crevices of black satiation. The elderly trees coughed lightly, hurriedly, in remonstrance against the invasion. Lean with a virginal poison, the grass-blades shook, immune to light and time. A bird lost in a tree, shrilly flirted with its energy. One fool in the garden spoke to another. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Advice to a Grass-Blade. By Maxwell Bodenheim. Read by Wes Freeman. Thin and dark green symbol of an earth forever raising myriads of chained wings. Breezes have a form to you, and sounds break into vivid shape. The proud finality of tiny sight cannot lure your pliant blindness. Thin and dark green blade be not awed by trees and men whose sound is all that gives them life. You reach the sky because your face is not turned toward it. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. East Side, New York. By Maxwell Bodenheim. Read for LibriVox.org. By Nima. An old Jew munches an apple with conquering immersion all the thwarted longings of his life urge on his determined teeth. His face is hard and pear-shaped. His eyes are muddy capitulations. But his mouth is incongruous, softly, slightly distended like that of a whistling girl. It is ingenuously haunting and makes the rest of him a soiled gray background. The hopes that lie within their grave of submissive sternness have spilled their troubled ghost upon this mouth. And a tortured belief has dwindled into tenderness upon it. He trudges off behind his push-cart and the ghetto walks away with him. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. To A Man by Maxwell Bodenheim. By Larry Wilson. Master of earnest equilibrium you are a Christ made delicate by centuries of baffled meditation. You curve an old myth to a peaceful sword like some sleepwalker challenging the dream that gave him shape. With gentle antique insistence you place your child's hand on the universe and trace a smile of love within its depths. And yet the whirling scarecrow men have made of something that eludes their sight may have the startling simplicity of your smile. Once every thousand years stillness fades into a shape that men may crucify. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Child Meditates by Maxwell Bodenheim. The oak tree in front of my house smells different every morning. Sometimes it smells fresh and wise like my mother's hair. Sometimes it stands ashamed because it doesn't own the smell it borrowed from our flower garden. Sometimes it has a windy smell as though it had come back from a long walk. The oak tree in front of my house has different smells like grown up people. My doll hides behind her pink cheeks so that you can't see when she moves. But it doesn't matter because she always moves and that is why people think she is still. People laugh when I say that my doll is alive. But if she were dead, my fingers wouldn't know that they were touching her. She lives inside a little house and laughs because I cannot find the door. The colors in my room meet each other and hesitate. Is that what people call shape? Nobody seems to think so. But I believe that lines are dead shapes unless they fall against each other and look surprised like the colors in my room. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Pirat Objects by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson They have made me an area apology for the crude insistence of their flesh. They have made me twist my tongue into fickle nonchalance. With a languid impedance they have teared underneath the moon while the haggard reticence of their lives forgot itself within me. Well, I am rebelling at the men who make me their grimacing marionette. Let them find another dancing teacher for their dull, unruffled fears. I am off to tear my black and white into shreds within a valley where nakedness and colors do not need an artificial night to make them brave. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Columbine Reflects by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson They have molded my face with a tear and a sneer. They have sandaled me with caprice and the heart they have given me is a bag of red tissue paper. Their loves are ragged in fat and seek the consolation of a tinkling effigy. But even an effigy may wink an eye at its linking masters. I can laugh at their frantic, tattered arms spinning me into impish posturings and jeer at the faces behind me. After my play, I go to sleep, but they must sit heavily looking at each other. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Rattlesnake Mountain Dialogue by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Nemo as Rattlesnake Mountain and Man Read by Larry Wilson Every night the sky grips my shoulder in pain. The cows upon my slope attack their blades of grass with less decision. The boulders reaching in to form my ribs are touched by evening dizziness to dust and lose their fierce pretense of hardness. Three crows in a row search for clear tongues with steady discords. The nervous dissolution which men call beauty stands sternly watching itself. Evening, staggering under dead men's tongues makes light of my loneliness. He comes like a madman dissolved into unbearable quietness. But drinking my vigorous muteness he melts into that stream of seeking motion which men call mourning. You teach him to make his recompense a solitary unfolding walking perestly between the scowls of life and death. When he goes he is something more than himself. He holds a lean alertness that green as any leaf takes the flutterings of life unperturbed. Beauty is a proud stare challenging all things to remove their inattentive clamors and some things bow abruptly timidly stroking their untouched skins. And thus evening bows into mourning and a poem. This recording is in the public domain. Dialogue between a past and present poet by Maxwell Bodenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Nemo, as present poet, and... Past Poet, read by Larry Wilson. I wrote of roses on a woman's breast glowing as though her blood had welled up to a spellbound fierceness and the glad light mixture of her hair. I wrote of God and angels. They stole the simple blush of my desire to make their isolated triumph human. Knights and kings flooded my song, catching with their glittering clash the unheard boldness in my life. Gods and nymphs slipped through my voice and with the lofty scurrying of their feet spurned the smirked angers of my days. You raised an unhurried church-like escape. You lingered in shimmering idleness or lengthened a prayer into a lance or strengthened a thought tilled heaved off all of life and dropped its sightless heaven into your smile. Life to us is a colorless tangle like madly gorgeous weavers our eyes reiterate themselves on life. My towering simplicity loosening an evening of belief over the things it dared not view gladly shunned reality just as your mad weaver does. Reality is a formless lure and only when we know this do we dare to be unreal. End a poem. This recording is in the public domain. Upon this nervous shop girl's face were clusters of tiny limpness meet a frightened spark leaps high and drops into the hot paws of a vanished love a lusturously plump girl beside her does not know that her face for moments glows into a helpless solitude. Upon an old man's face are gleams of meek embarrassment the faded presence of some old debt the man's face is scorched by a torch that falls from weary hands and makes her laugh in unheard lie. The face of this tamed sprite shimmers with an understanding of the opaque loss she cannot bear and I see that smiles are sometimes words beyond the words that thoughts abandon hopefully. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Last night I met a passive man with almost no curve to his face and skin relentlessly white he made me tell his fortune with a pack of cards. Jack of hearts your love will be a scullion overturning trays of food and standing dubiously in their midst Queen of diamonds you will have a wife like a thistle dipped in frost helpless in your sheathed hands deuce of clubs a downcast jester will pester you with slanty malice when you seek to play the king. Ace of hearts your life will stand straight in a desperate majesty his lurid robes ever slipping and one wounded endlessly dripping the passive man blew out a candle and on the table he made me leave not desiring to see his face. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Mount of Bank criticizes by Maxwell Bordenheim read for Libby Rocks.org by Algypug I lose all sense of profiles strolling through your grays and blacks and browns no man bestows his orange robes soberly upon your uncoloured pavements rebuking life for being death no woman taunts her sorrows with the coloured haughtiness when you take to colours you are ashamed like pages nibbling at a pilfered tart you go back quickly to your coldness and since you have no colours on your clothes you walk in straight and measured lilts as per fits the seriously blind your women do not stroll as though each step were a timid intrigue woven into the climax to which they fare pistols, rhapsodies and heavy odours drugged the lustre of my time yet we had a virtue we lavished colours on our backs and ravished our sorrow with brightness that often gave a lightness to our feet. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. To Lee Type Paul by Maxwell Bordenheim read for Libby Rocks.org by Larry Wilson They are writing poems to you white devils who have not smeared the distant yellow of your life upon their skins Faces where snob and harlequin augule each other in two cold colours white and red Faces where middle age sits tearing Alaskardina Faces continually cracked by the brittle larceny of age Faces where emotions stand disarmed with a calm mirage These faces bend over paper and steal from you a little silver and red so that their lives may seem to bleed under the prick of a flashing need The old and tired smile of one who spies too much within himself to spare the effort of a halting frown brushed its scepter over your face You gave kind eyes to your hope desiring it to grope unfearing underneath the toppling mountain tops The wine you drank was a lake in which you splashed and found a vigor The wine you drank was void of taste Your yellow skin resembled a balanced docility smiling at all things even at itself the Tai Po End of poem This recording is in the public domain Insanity by Maxwell Bowdenheim Read for Libby Rocks.org April 6090, California, United States of America Like a vivid hyperbole the sun plunged into April's freshness and struck its sparkling madness against the barn-like dejection of this dark red insane asylum A softly clutching noise stumbled from the open windows Now and then obliquely reeling shrieks rose as though from men to whom death had assumed an expressably kindly face A man stood at one window his gaunt face trembling underneath a feverish jauntiness A long white feather slanted back upon his almost shapeless hat Like an innocent evasion hotly incessant his voice methodically flogged the April air a voice that held the clashing bones of happiness and fear a voice in which emotion sharply ridiculed itself A monstrously vigorous voice mockingly tearing at life with an unanswerable question Hollowed out by his powl I turned and saw an asylum guard His petulantly flabby face rolled into death-like chips of eyes He bore the aimless confidence of one contentedly playing with other men's wings He walked away The man above still shrieked I could not separate them End of poem This recording is in the public domain Track Workers by Maxwell Bodenheim Read for LibriVox.org by NEMA 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 brushed their lightly odored hands in vain against the 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 spiked-like auteur 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 End of poem Is in the Public Domain Figure by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson Through the turbulent servility of a churly city street he strides opaquely Nothing in his walk resembles an advancing gleam His legs are muffled iron stubbornly following even thoughts His gaily, pugnacious head seems worried because no dread remains for it to slay His eyes hold in austerity that recalls itself while leaping and often melts into amusement The bent poise of his body tells of walls that threw him back only to crumble underneath the stunned friendliness of his face Through the angularly, churly street he walks and stoopes beneath the captured weight of eyes that do not see him End of poem This recording is in the Public Domain Negros by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson The loose eyes of an old man shone aloof upon his boy's face and a sluggish innocence hugged his dull brown skin He sang a hymn caught from his elders and his voice resembled the quavering, feverish laugh softened in a swaying cradle His life had found a refuge in his voice and the rest of him was sickly flesh ignorant of life and death like a crushed excited clown his mother shuffled out upon the porch Slowly her dark brown face resolved into the husband and silky look of one who stands within a dim wall trap Lazily uncertain she raised the boy into her arms then her voice swung in the air like a quavering, feverish laugh softened in a swaying cradle End of poem This recording is in the Public Domain Broadway by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson With a sardonic futility the multicolored crowd hurried by fervent sensuality flees from something carried on its back endlessly subdued a sound pours up from the crowd like someone ever gasping for breath to utter releasing words Through the artificial valley made by gaudy evasions the stifled crowd files up and down stabbing thought with rapid noises women strutting dulcetly embroider their unappeased hungers and men stumble toward a flitting opiate Sometimes a moment breaks apart and one can hear the knuckles of children rapping on towering doors rapping on the highway where civilization parades its frozen amiabilities End of poem This recording is in the Public Domain Fifth Avenue, New York by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson Seasons bring nothing to this gulch save a harshly intimate anecdote squalled here and there on paint and stone The houses shoulder each other in a forced and passionless communion Their harassed angles rise like a violent picture puzzle hiding a story that only ruins could reveal Their straight lines robbed of power meet in dwarfed rebellion Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces suffering ants to crawl in and out of their gaping mouths Sometimes in menial attitudes they stand like gothic platitudes slips shoddily carved in dark brown stone Tarnished saleminities of death cast their transfigured hue on this avenue The cool and indiscriminate glare of sunlight seems to desecrate a tomb and the racing people seem a stream of accidental shadows Hard noises strike one's face and make it numb with momentary reality but the noiseless undertone returns and they change to unreal jests made by death End of poem This recording is in the public domain Young Woman by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Lurie Wilson So we have a face cupped by tender insolences half repenting insolences teasing their own angers Then a tense exuberance brushes them away and burns a humbly erect queen upon her face This happens in the space between a frown and indecision Her face becomes forlornly wild and a vaguely impatient hovers into furtive shame All the suppley intricate flame vanishes and leaves no mark Her eyes are violently dark with a hopeless waiting Her lips are isolated tatters all that is left of shattered recreating Then as quickly as she fled the humble queen returns Staring and unappeased she eyes her crumpled hands End of poem This recording is in the public domain Two Women on a Street by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibriVox.org by Nima This street is callous apathy in a scale of grays and browns Its black ruff lines suggest flat bodies unable to rise Even its screams are listlessness having an evil dream Its air swarthy rawness troubled with ash cans and cellars An old woman ambles on with a black bag that seems part of her back and a candidly hawk-like face She croons a smothered lullaby that sifts a flitting roundness into her sharply parted face Then she surrenders her hand to the welter of a garbage can A hugely wilted woman slinks by with a cracked stare on her face Her eyes are beaten disk of the lamplight's ghastly keenness She glides away as though the night were a lover flogging her Glides into the callous apathy of this street like one who cringes happily into her lover's hallway End of poem, this recording is in the public domain Advice to Maple Trees by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibreVox.org by Larry Wilson O little Maple Trees slender and unkempt looking with jaggy escants upon the moon-spiked solitude O little Maple Trees growing a little toward the sky that touches you to all eyes save your own You rattle insistently for wings but wings could never tear the stain of earth from your feet The earth that gnaws at you until your wing cries strike the autumn night You see with me this crescent moon juggled on the tony fingertip of a running cloud The touch of your desire or its fall would but be symbols of an equal depth End of poem, this recording is in the public domain Boarding House Episode by Maxwell Boddenheim Read for LibreVox.org by Larry Wilson Apples race into appetites The unswerving mechanism of the table hurries through the last dish of supper Then an undulating interlude from people who have spent one pleasure distractedly juggling its aftermath and peering at new desires One woman gazes at another while twitching murder shimmers in her eyes and skims across her face Violets in a madman scene suspended in the air are the eyes of her neighbor And in between them sits the nervous man with face like pouting gargoyle whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot say Expulsive evasions fears too tired to shriek renunciations groaning from their dungeons He eyes each woman like a man solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice Crisp inanities ripple back and forth among these three like ghostly parrots visiting each other's cages She, with crazy violet eyes plays with her fork as though its clink rhymed with secret chained thoughts She, with murder in her eyes and curtly voluminous body evenly plays her child's role cringing on the rim of middle age with broken shields piled at her feet She has made this man a haunted palace and she stands before the door she dare not open with a dagger for the woman standing at her side They sit afterwards upon the veranda meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening woman with twisted violet eyes woman with hidden murder on her lips and man like a pouting gargoyle Then, like tired children their words grow cool and lazy They draw closer to each other and with a trembling curiosity look at each other's hands In the poem this recording is in the public domain Vodville Moment by Maxwell Boddenheim They have carved a battle across your hard face transfigured conflict lines like suspended lances Your voice must be the uneven clink of the last carver's chisel Your soul must be a pious centrifuge squinting its admiring eyes at the lifeless battle lining your face Middle-aged Vodville conductor with a haunted leanness on your body Sometimes the swing of your baton sways with the brooding patience that violates your ended face Two acrobats appear with their automaton bows Their unlit motion does not strike the air into a hugging flame They are blue and orange corpses whirled in a sacrilegious festival they vividly resemble the chiseled battle that grips this lean conductor's face motion without life and life that holds no motion End of poem This recording is in the public domain To Oric Johns by Maxwell Boddenheim read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson The treadmill roar that ever tramps between the smirked geometries of this stern place sweeps vainly on your drassily reckless face lost in a swirl of raped loves barely seen Sometimes your keenly-pakin lips are raised by thoughts too tense to shape themselves in speech still wounded thoughts that silently beseech your life to make them impotent and dazed O tangled and half-strangled child you shrink forever from yourself and wear a pose of nibble and impenetrable pride Yet sometimes wavering on the sudden brink of jaded bitterness you drop your clothes and weave a prayer into your naked stride End of poem This recording is in the public domain Young Port by Maxwell Boddenheim read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson The grinning clamour on your face dies abruptly for moments boldness and timidity are swept transfigured against each other but the glistening turmoil once more spurns itself with jests that light its troubled hands When too much pain has lowered the eyelids of your mood a peaceful humour wraps your face You are like an old man watching children fly from his fingertips In your curtled, borrowed skies you find a sorrow luring your horizons into hesitating brightness When night remembers you have straightened into stealthy, angry calmness fingering its first unset arrow End of poem This recording is in the public domain Steel Mills, South Chicago by Maxwell Boddenheim One This red hush toppling over the sky wanders one step toward the stars and dies in a questioning shiver The steel mill chimneys fling their gaunts seeking a little distance into the red that softly combs their smoky hair The steel mill chimneys only live at night when crimson light makes love to them The starlight trickles through the red like glimpses of some far-off fairy tale Throughout the day the steel mill chimneys stand rigidly within the wind world glare Only night can bring them subtle straightness Two From the little brown gate that does not see them because its eyes are blind with woe and soot An endless stream of men scatters out into the cool bewilderment of mourning Their lips, a limply child-like surrender curves out to the light as though they felt the presence of an unassuming strangeness The mourning hides from their eyes They walk on in great strides like blind men swinging over a well-known scene Their faces twitch with echoes of iron fists Their faces hold a swarthy stupor loosened by little fingers of mourning light until it droops into reluctant life Their eyes, made flat by night swell into a Madonna-like surprise and children trooping back in huge disguise The arches and lunchroom windows change to sleek suns dipped in sleepy night And rounded tarts and china plates are like red heartbeats resting but not dead The trolley-car speeds by and seems a strident lyric of motion Wagons rumble down the street like drums enticing weariness to step The hearts of these steel-striding men ascend and blend within their eyes and yet these men are unaware of this They only feel a fluid relief voicing in a cluster of roar the cries of struggling thoughts unshaped by words But there are some who break forth from the rest This old Hungarian strides along and binds naively winged prayer sandals upon the heavy feet of shuffling loves Gently he plays with his beard as though his fingers touched a woman's hair And this young slob who surly blasphemy curls his face into a simple hate has taken iron into his laugh and uses it to hue his stony mind All this Italian whose deep ball of skin shines like sunlight groping through dense leaves forgets his battered happiness and bows with mock grace to his shouting day Beside him is a fellow countryman walking aimless, dazed with joy of motion Upon his face a glistening vacancy lights the mildly querying thoughts that seek each other but never meet Behind him steps a stalwart pole whose rhythmic stately insolence turns the sidewalk into a gray carpet Gray is the shades that race across his face and show the savage squalor of his soul Night has broken her heart upon him All these scarring has bit her smile A street of little jack-o'-lantern houses veering into leering saloons where the night a crazy child dips herself in shallow rouge and chases oaths and heavy mirth and even human beings where the smoky sadness of the steel mills wanders hesitantly into death and drops a ghostly blur upon this girl her numbly waxin' cherub face emerges gently from the doorway's blackness as though the dark had given birth to it and then the falling light reveals that something of a village hangs about her something slumbering and ample the doorway is too small to hold her shoulders that are like a hill's broad curves dwindled in the distance she is one of many earth-curved girls who listen to the insistent tinkle of wind-winged music from a far-off land listened and knew not that their own hearts faintly played so she ran to this far phantom only finding it within herself when the city's sly fists rained upon it then once more she fled with a dead heart whose restless pallor crept to squalid wantonness for refuge and now she stands within this doorway uttering muffled innuendos to the drained men of her race it's something of a village hangs about her something slumbering and ample stealing from the earth curves of her shoulders three the steel mill workers straggled down the street claying shut the doorways of their souls and the sound rips their lips open the steel mill workers do not know of this they only seek something that will sweeten the dirt that has eaten into their flesh and change it to raw music they straggle down this street their faces slack and oiled with amorousness like cats they play with their desires biting them with little laughs until the sallow houses draw them in and then the night pursues their revelry echoes from the shut doors of their souls four three bent women and a child stoop before the steel mill gate as though the morning's ghastly murmur washed against them in a wave stiffening them into resisting curves one is old and floridly misshapen years have melted out within her frame flooding her with lukewarm loves the wrinkles on her flabby face are like a faded scroll of pain scattered by the flesh on which it rests her frayed shawl hanging unaware of her as a symbol of her heart the woman standing at her side is tall and like a slanting scarecrow coldly jerky in the morning's glare only when she lifts a bony hand tapping life against her face does the image disappear dead dreams dangle in her heart limply hanging from the rainbow sashes and whenever one sash trembles then she lifts a gnarled hand to her face and takes a moment of departing life near her stands a slimly rigid woman with an iron fear upon her bones a worn straight jacket of lines cuts the dying youth upon her face the slender child beside her buried within stately murky clothes glances frightenedly up at her mother glances as one who dances to a gate and fumbles for a latch that hides itself then from the rusty revered steel mill gate an endless stream of men scatter out into the cool bewilderment of morning upon their lips a limply child-like surrender curves out to the light as though they felt the presence of an unassuming strangeness end of poem this recording is in the public domain South State Street, Chicago by Maxwell Bowden I 1. rows of blankly box-like buildings raise their sodden architecture into the poised lyric of the sky at their feet pawn shops and burlesque theaters yawn beneath their livid confetti in the pawn shop windows violins cut glass bowls and satchels mildly blink upon the mottled turbulence outside and sit with that detached assurance gripping things inanimate near them slyly shaded forays stand and bland and ornate sleep and the glassy luridness of penny arcades flades the eyes the black crowd clatters like an idiot's wrath 2. wander with me down the street where the spectral night is caught like moon paint on a colorless lane on this corner stands a woman sleekly, sulkily, complacent like a tigress nibbling bits of sugar at her side a brawny white-faced man whose fingers waltz upon his checkered suit searches for one face amidst the crowd his smile is like a rambling sword his elbows almost touch a snowy girl whose body blooms with cool withdrawal from her little nook of peaceful scorn she casts unseeing eyes upon the crowd near her stands a weary news-boy with a sullenly elfin face the night has leaned too intimately on the frightened scampering of his soul but to this old, stately, patient woman with her softly wintery eyes night bends down in gentle revelation undisturbed by joy or hatred at her side two factory girls and slyly jaunty hats and swaggering coats weave a twinkling summer with their words a summer where the night parades rakeishly and like a gold bull-brunnel with a gnome-like impotence they thrust their little pink tongues out at men whose sigh he'll pass to them the frantic dinginess of day has melted to caressing restlessness tingling with the pride of breasts and hips at their side two dainty-languid girls playing with their suavely tangled dresses touched the black crowd with unsearching eyes but the old man on the corner bending over his cane like some tired warrior resting on a sword peers at the crowd with the smoldering disdain of a king whipped out of his domain for a moment he smiles uncertainly and wears a look of frail sternness musty rebellasy and noters stray from his naively gilded family entrance make the body of a vagrant quiver as though unseen roses grazed him his face is blackly stubbled emptiness swerving to the rotted prayers of eyes yet sometimes his thin arm leaps out and hangs a moment in the air as though he raised a violin of hate and lacked the strength to play it a woman lurches from the family entrance with tense solicitude she hugs her can of beer against her stunted bosom and mumbles to herself the trampled blasphemy upon her face holds up in death swattery barren eyes indifferently she brushes past the vagrant life is peeled away her sense of touch three with groping majesty the endless crowd pounds at searching chant of feet down this tawed relief resplendent street people stray into a burlesque theater framed with scarlet blankly retunned girls hear a burly cattle raiser walks with the grace of windswept prairie grass behind him steps a slender clerk tendering his sprightly stridency to the stolid doll-like girl beside him at his side a heavy youth dully stands beneath his swaggering mask and a smiley man in black and white walks like some perro grown middle-aged mutely twinkling fragments of a romance tiny lights stand over this cabaret men and women jovling in bolden stroll beneath the curtain entrance and their last like softly brazing cowbells change the scene to a strange pastoral hectic shepherdesses drunk with night women mingle their coquettish colors suddenly a man leaps out from the doorways blazing pallor smashing into the drab sidewalk drunk ellipse and eyelids break apart like a clown and sudden suicide then the mottled nakedness of the scene comes like a blow stoically crushed in hovering gray night lies coldly on the street momentary sounds crash into night like ghostly curses stifled in their birth and over all the blankly box-like buildings raise their son architecture into the poised lyric of the sky end of poem this recording is in the public domain end of Advice a book of poems by Maxwell Bowdenheim