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New Bottles
The Naked Truth
War Lines
New and Old Songs
Personal Privilege
Facets of Truth
LUKE, NORTH
1 9 1 7
Los Angeles
GOLDEN PRESS
NOT copyRIGHTED
•º 42
To whose APPRECIATION MANY of THEs ºr
VERSES OWE THEIR EXISTENCE-
WILLIAM F. GABLE
C O N T E N T S
Songs of the Great Adventure
A Million Jobless Men
Audacity
A War Song for Men
California,
Give Labor the Vision of a Free Earth------
‘‘I Am for Men”
Omitted from the Spoon River Anthology
On and After—
That the Land Be Opened to Man-------------.
The White Man’s Totem
This Will Come
Title
What’s It to You ?
Who Will Join The Great Adventure?........
Who Will Work for a Free Earth 2..............
New Bottles
A Man's Prayer
A New Valor
Antinomies
As to Hate
Be Strong First
Earth's God
Hate Gods, Love Men
Hate Is Force
Humility
Life Lures
Man’s God
No Man's Reeper
Self Respect
That I May Strive
The Blind Goddess
The Love of Gold or the Love of Man..........
The Master Motive
The Nativity
The New Art
Contents 5
The New Power 68
The Old Art 56
The Only Danger 51
The Only Revolutionary 48
The Only Virtue 52
The State 76
The Unknown 46
To Keep the Ideal 53
Wanted—Men 61
The Naked Truth
Be Truthful 80
Bottom Facts 82
Business 81
Culture 82
I Am Free 83
If He Were Yours 99
If We Hated Murder 100
I Will Not Fight 102
Only the Poor 97
Preparedness 84
Stark Winter 78
Three Blood Brothers 86
Two in a Million 94
We Love Murder 98
We're Going to Hang a Boy in California.------------ 88
Where Are the Women of California 2-----------------... 92
Who Are the Strong? 79
Your Brother 101
War Lines
A Flaggerel 110
All This Killing 112
Armageddon 104
If We Must 116
Its Shame 114
Its Strut 114
Peace and War 113
Slay Your Masters 115
The Eucharist 116
The Lesser Evil 113
The Lie 114
6 Contents
The New War
The Real War
War’s Masks
War Will Not Cease
New and Old Songs
A Man Belief
A Plea for Man
Song of the Hangman
Song of the Printing Press-----..........-------------
Song of the Railway Crossing
That Love Be Bold
The Doctrine of Rights
Personal Privilege
A Friend of Mine
At the Rosslyn Hotel
Divergence
Fay
Now
109
109
106
108
126
120
128
118
122
125
131
138
145
139
140
144
136
142
Personal Privilege
Why I Stay
Facets of Truth
Human Nature
Human Nature Percentages
Ideals
Martyrdom and Sacrifice
Not the Worst Thing
Oodles of Rnowledge
Personal Salvation
Still Waiting for Heaven
The Heart Leads
The Line of Cleavage
The Silver Thread
The Source of Power
The World Is Awake
151
149
153
154
157
155
153
150
158
156
148
152
159
Songs of The Great Adventure
Songs of The Great Adventure 9
AUDACITY
Indeed, on earth with Fate we shall conspire,
Recast the wolfish Scheme of Things entire,
Break feudal codes that hold men from the earth,
Remold the nations to the Heart’s Desire.
'Tis Fear that cozens Hope of its caress
And leaves your piety all comfortless.
'Tis Fear, I say, that robs e'en Love of joy
And tinges human life with bitterness.
'Tis Fear, 'tis Fear of flesh, of death, of “lust”
In Nature, God, or Self, no helpful trust.
All modern life is ruled by dead men's codes—
Its Faith is based on shining bits of dust.
O Man! stand up, and dare be What thou art;
Dare live, enjoy, demand; forget the mart;
Dare to be free, dare even that thine Heart
Shall lead! O, be the very God thou art.
Dare lift thy head from custom’s slavish yoke,
Tear from Society its tradesman’s cloak.
Dare take the Soil, thy heritage of birth—
Dare all, dare all! Thyself alone invoke!
O, be a gambler bold and freely throw
The dice of life, lay all its hollow show
Of dross upon the cloth—its Gold to win–
And play the greatest game the heart can know!
10 Songs of The Great Adventure
WHO WILL WORK FOR A
FREE EARTH P
Who will work for a Free Earth—
To establish the rule that no one shall hold
more land than he uses—
Who will—Work!—not merely talk and attend
lectures and banquets—Who will Work
To end poverty quickly by establishing the
rule and the law—
That the Earth shall be open to all on
equal terms?
Who will do his share Now—
Here in California, Oregon, Texas—wherever—
At This Moment to apply the Golden Rule
at the base of life—
To abolish basic laws and customs that pau-
perize the many by giving the land and its
resources to monopolists and speculators—
Who will Work now to establish the rule of a
Free Earth?
Who will give all he can—
Of himself, his talents, his time, his thought,
his cash, and his energy—
Whatever he has to give—give it freely,
finely, generously,
For no private gain higher or lower
Than the satisfaction of doing his utmost to
halt the starving of children, the prostitu-
tion of maids, the wage slaveries of men and
women, the disemployment of millions—
Who will give and work Now?
Who Will Work for Free Earth? 11
Here is the Opportunity—
To take an actual, tangible, definite step in a
legal and orderly manner
To achieve the First Necessity of an unenslaved
Manhood— A Free and Open Earth!
The rule of which once gained, the down-
ward pressure toward greater and greater
human degradation—toward increasing
suicide, crime, prostitution, and disemploy-
ment—will be halted!
On a free and open earth—
Cooperation will be practicable,
Real Individualism will be possible,
Fraternalism’s profit can be shared by all,
The parent Privilege will be dead!
The root cause of War will be gone!
The institutions of Comradeship may then
begin to grow.
Dreams and longings of the enlightened human
heart may then take shape.
Man's innate sense of justice (sans quibble)—
The human passion to utter freely the Soul’s
fondest boldest deepest urges—
Manhood's need to be fearless and expansive
—his everlasting search for the Intangible!
Womanhood’s need for a wholesome earth on
which to breed Courageous Men—and lure
them to higher daring with the “starry
treachery of her eyes!”—
All these—and all the lesser or greater things of
growth, happiness, peace, comfort, expression
and experience—
Whatever it is that all or any of us are after—
All these must Begin!
How can they otherwise begin save—
On a Free and Open Earth?
12 Songs of The Great Adventure
And here we have made a start—
Here in California and in Oregon and in
Texas—
Here we have drawn a Human Bill
—a peoples’ measure, to be enacted by the
People—
A bill that says in essence: “Use your land
or get off it and let some one else use it—
use the oil, coal, timber, ores of the earth or
yield the titles by which you hold them
idleſ”
By the terms of this bill the People assert
(grant and establish to themselves)—
To the Whole People on Equal Terms
The earth and its resources!—
Grant and Establish to Themselves at least
the legal power to control and share fairly
the land and its produce.
If there develop “other bridges to cross”
Before the earth can be opened to all men—
We shall be the better able to cross them
having crossed this one unitedly, compactly.
If other power than legal power
Shall be necessary to open the earth to man
We shall be thrice armed and doubly strong
For having taken the legal power Together!
Here now is the struggle for a Free Earth
Fairly begun
What will You do to further it?
Songs of The Great Adventure 13
GIVE LABOR THE VISION OF A FREE
EARTH
Comes a voice: “Labor is Life—Not Vision!”
Comes to rebuke the idealists, those “dreamy
men and women filled with ideas.”
A voice
Echoing the masters' dictum
That whatever is must be;
And the church’s dogma—
A few are chosen of God and many not.
It is not true. What is
“God and my country” but a vision?
What are all the shibboleths of the masters—
Law and Order, Progress, Posterity,
Patriotism, Majesty of the Law,
Preservation of the State—
Would you call them actualities?—
And a thousand other sounding phrases
By which the masses are chained—
What are these but visions?—
False ideals impressed upon Labor,
Dreams (nightmares) dogmas
By which Labor was led to captivity
And is held there?
Labor does not originate its own visions
But its capacity for them is inherent
Unending profound.
Labor is led imprisoned bound
And might be Freed
By visions!
Above all is Labor Vision—
14 Songs of The Great Adventure
Too much so for that it lacks wisdom
To sift the false from the true
And falls victim to the abstract ideals
Most insistently impressed upon it.
Only by Visions—
By ideals unattaint of narrow petty personal cash
or material considerations—
Shall Labor be led to its own unfoldment,
For only by visions
Is Labor deeply stirred
And blindly led.
As Labor is led to the shambles
So it can be led to the Light—
By Visions.
Give Labor the vision of a Free Earth
And a Splendid Manhood
Here!—in this world—
Now!—in this generation.
Give it the vision of an earth free
Of hate and its gallows—
An earth with no prisons or penal codes,
No judges and detectives,
No landlords and paupers—
Give Labor a vision
That will stir its soul to Action,
Awaken its heroism and daring
And Manhood!
Labor is not all blind
All content with its chains.
See, it turns toward the Light—
Yearns for other Visions!
And we meet Labor's soul hunger
With logic! with political economy!
With lectures and resolutions—
Give Labor the Vision 15
Of a thousand differing and contradicting kinds.
We greet Labor with our own
Lack of Vision
Or with hopeless theologic platitudes
A little changed in phrasing.
Labor staggers confused bewildered
At the multiplicity of counsel.
Our mechanized logic frightens it.
Whom shall it follow—
Which ist or ism of a dozen?
And where is the Vision—
The saner, better, purer Ideal
Than “God and my country”?
Labor is not Vision, say you?
Labor is all Vision—a prisoner to its visions.
It is we who think a little
That lack vision.
Think a little harder, friends—
Open the heart—
And back will come the vision—
The beautiful vision of a Free Earth
Without paupers, parasites, and prostitutes—
The vision we have lost
In wrangling over its distant details,
In debating how (not) to obtain it—
The vision of a decenter Home for Man
On Earth—on a free earth!—
Forgetful that only Labor can build it.
We have lost the Vision.
Open the Heart for its return.
Let it burn out
The dissonances of our differences
And knit us into a compact priesthood
To lead the human mass
To its own unfoldment.
16 Songs of The Great Adventure
With our regained Vision
Let us greet Labor.
With our Vision
We will arouse in Labor
Its deepest wildest strongest
Holiest and boldest Passion
Of Man for Man,
The passion of Life and daring
And High Adventure
That shall tread down
Tyrants and tyranny,
Exploiters and exploitation,
In a mad mighty rush of Man
Toward the Light—
In a sweep as impetuous
As a band of a thousand bisons
Obliterating everything in its path—
As irresistibly as the manhood of Europe
Swept across the nations and the seas
To rescue the Holy Sepulchre!
Labor has no vision?
It once had!
And can have again.
Labor has no vision!
Whose fault is that?
Ours.
We, the makers of visions—
The natural priesthood of the mass—
We have failed
To give Labor a Vision.
When in distrust
Of its theologic visions
It turns to us
We give it—economics!
Give Labor the Vision 17
Labor has had visions,
Has one now—
Hell’s vision of death and hate and murder
In Europe.
And in America
It clings doubtingly to the old visions,
The masters’ visions—
But its face is turned our way
And in its eyes is a cosmic hunger
A world longing—a mute
Searching passion for a New Vision
Ere it plunges
To another sea of blood.
No vision!
Let us give it a Vision—
An impracticable unattainable
Dream Vision!
In its rush to gain which
It may strike off many chains
And at the mid-goal
Find itself on a Free Earth
Potentially its own master.
Do we fear?
Do we doubt?
What is it that stays us?
Shall the mass be led only by evil visions?
Can’t the mass be led by
Love as well as hate?
Can't it be easier led by
Love than by hate—
To its own unfolding
Than its own undoing?
The cosmic tide of human progression
The world wave of democratization
The trend of all the human centuries
18 Songs of The Great Adventure
Are ours to use.
They await intelligent employment.
They point the way
Of Least Resistance!
Kings priests exploiters
Have to battle against them.
They are on our side.
All the Powers of Light, seen and unseen,
known and guessed,
Will aid us.
Love and intelligence—
The human head and heart—
All their highest mightiest values—
Those that have saved the race
From extinction
In its darkest hours—
All will be on our side!
Impracticable!
It is the only practicable
Move on the human horizon—
The only one that will achieve
Anything worth crossing the street to get.
It is the only move
That can win!
Greed's tyranny is
Increasing!
In America, as elsewhere,
Its victims grow more numerous
Every year.
Manhood is waning!
Your hope of further education
Is futile
On a monopolized earth!
Why do we haggle and hesitate—
We, the Intelligent Minority of America?
Give Labor the Vision 19
If Labor has no Vision—
The fault is ours.
Come, let us regain our Vision
And show it to Labor—to the human mass—
And start them on
The Holiest Crusade
The weary old world has ever known l—
Man's Great Adventure—the quest
For the human alkahest!
20 Songs of The Great Adventure
THIS WILL COME
And Labor bold in all its might shall rise
Its own to grasp and hold—high heaven emprise!
The earth to seize and make forever Free—
Thus strip from Greed its power to tyrannise!
TITLE
What mortal makes or adds an inch of land?
O'er earth let him alone stretch forth the hand
Of lustful ownership and sun and air
And liberty and even life command!
Songs of The Great Adventure 21
WHO WILL JOIN THE GREAT
ADVENTURE P
Who then will join a movement to release Amer-
ica's land to its inhabitants upon Equal
Terms?—
Destroy Privilege at its Base
Halt the hunger, prostitution, child labor, and
“crime” so ridiculously Unnecessary in an
undeveloped land of immeasurable richness!—
Stop the Cosmic Hideous Joke of a million idle
men on a billion. Unused Acres!!
Who will join a movement to release Man from
needless, deadening poverty and free him to
himself—to his better, truer, kinder, whole-
some Self that hungers for expression and
experience, and is deterred first and mainly
by the terrible economic pressure which
brings but misery and grief even to the
few who reap its harvest?
Who will join—Who will give themselves unre-
servedly—
Who will find their own keenest good—
Who will serve, and dare, with no hope of
reward or preferment, for no honors, titles,
emoluments, epaulettes, or iron crosses—the
greatest cause the world has ever known?
Who will join the Great Adventure!—to free, not
a class, not a race nor a color of men, but
all men!—
22 Songs of The Great Adventure
And make of America the world’s Asylum
where every one may find a
Home without a Landlord and reap all
his labor sows?
Who will join with those who Care and Feel and
will Resolve to Free the Earth
Quickly! tomorrow, today, very soon!—in This
generation!—Now—
By the force of numbers!
By the power of Human Sympathy quickened
to life from its long sleep in the deeps of
Man?
For the manumission of All, regardless of
class, creed, doctrine, tenet, ism—
Heeding only the First Human Need, free
access to the Land!
Who will help the effort to establish a tenure
of use and occupance as sole title to earth,
air, and sky—
Thus to abolish Exploitation at its root–
By an Immediate appeal to the Heart of the
Human Crowd!
Careful to eschew ephemeral sentimentality, or
the lower emotions that lead to violence and
play into the hands of Greed—
Yet fearless of any contingency, deeming the
Human Need of paramount importance—
A concentrated, united appeal, by the Entire In-
telligent Minority of America—
Of all the sociologic schools and doctrines—
Combined in a mighty effort to arouse the
whole human mass from its Apathy—
Centering upon the One Demand, a Free Earth
Who Will Join 23
(intellectual differences of method to be con-
sidered afterward)—
Invoking as its leverage the only power of
human unanimity, the Heart Force latent in
every being—
Who will join The Great Adventure?
ON AND AFTER —
On and after—
O, what shall the date be?
On and after which
No man shall rob another
By authority of the State.
On and after—
Men! Let's make it soon!
On and after which
No man’s daughter need sell
Her sex for bread.
24 Songs of The Great Adventure
On and after—
Are we nearly ready to be Men?
On and after which
None shall kill and debauch
By power of the State.
On and after—
The world has waited long for
the date
On and after which
Greed shall not fatten
On human sweat and blood.
On and after—
Men will blush to recall the day
On and after which
Five million jobless wanderers
Found homes and work on the
Land!
On and after—
On and after which
No man shall hold of earth
More than he can use!
Songs of The Great Adventure 25
“I AM FOR MEN”
He stood for Men—
Not for parties, sections, classes;
Not for dogmas, doctrines, isms—
Nor all the minutiae of over-elaborated plans for
the future,
Nor for craven caution, dissimulation, equivoca-
tion—
Patience that now outrages virtue—
Program’d ways and means which if not followed
The world may stay in hell.
He stood for Men—
For in his soul he knew the line of cleavage
Was not between the robber and the robbed—
Was not marked by external difference,
By rank or class or occupation or wealth or
poverty.
He knew that poor men could be very cruel and
rich men kind.
He knew the line of cleavage was in the heart—
those who care and those who don’t—
This Henry George who wrote “Progress and
Poverty.”
He stood for Men—
And was he wrong to yield no tithe to classes?
What has now become of all the appeals
To class interest, class consciousness, class soli-
darity?
The human heart will not respond to them—in
every class are tyrants.
The human mass forgets its every interest,
Flings to the wind all self and class advantage
26 Songs of The Great Adventure
And goes out to die for a word.
He stood for Men
And showed the world how to unshackle the
chains that bind men.
He showed how poverty begins,
Where modern slavery has its roots,
And how to tear them up.
The earth is for all men, he said—
And his word has gone around the world—
And now it’s time to act!
He stood for Men
Not creeds and doctrines, nor all the lesser de-
tails of future contingencies.
He bared the earth to man.
It is for us to take it.
He tried to gain it, and was beaten back to his
death.
Now we will gain it—
At whatever cost!
Songs of the Great Adventure 27
A MILLION JOBLESS MEN
A million jobless men—
On twenty-three hundred million acres of idle
earth
Rich with unworked mines,
Webbed with highways and railroads,
Watered with rivers and brooks
Under snow-capped peaks and mountain lakes.
A Million jobless men—
In an idle, unused, vacant, fertile land
Dotted here and there with villages and cities
In which a hundred million mouths want food
And a hundred million human needs
And longings go half supplied.
A million jobless men—
Idle, hungry, roofless, shabby men
With ten million women and children depend-
ent upon them,
Wandering aimlessly over twenty-three hun-
dred million acres
Of land that is mostly fertile and mostly idle—
Idle, vacant, unused land—and a starving
people!
A million jobless men—
In an idle, vacant, unused land broad enough
To house without crowding every human be-
ing in the world—
Rich enough to support
All the earth's population,
Its own few people but partly housed, fed and
clothed!
28 Songs of The Great Adventure
A million jobless men—
Clerks, bookkeepers, artisans, laborers, all the
professions—
Men with nothing to do, who can find no work,
While two million stunted children labor in
mine and mill
And needy women must sell their sex for food—
A million or maybe six million jobless men!
A million jobless men—
And ten million poorly paid men who get
barely enough to sustain their families,
And a million women on the streets, and a
million hungry children,
Plus a million mortgaged homes, and a million
business bankrupts—
On twenty-three hundred million acres of inex-
haustible richness not a thousandth part of
which has been touched!
A million jobless men—
And twenty million human dolts content to live
in hell—
To lecture, write, legislate, investigate, resolve,
and vote
To “cure unemployment!” with a learned Presi-
dent
And a cabinet and a congress of economic
students
Who institute Employment Bureaus!! to feed
the hungry, jobless, idle men tramping over
idle, vacant, undeveloped land!
A million jobless men—
And ten million legislators, judges, detectives,
soldiers, sheriffs, constables, and policemen
With clubs, guns, bayonets, legal process, penal
A Million Jobless Men 29
codes, prisons, handcuffs, dungeons, and
gallows
To keep these million jobless men from going
on the idle, naked, fertile acres
And feeding themselves, their women, and
children!
A million jobless men—
In 1914
Now most all at work making death machinery
to blow each other to hell!
The land still idle—and a million wage slaves
making murder machinery!
30 Songs of The Great Adventure
A WAR SONG FOR MEN
Hear the rumbling legions
Now the hour of war!
Not to slay the foeman
Nor to bleed a state.
War for human beings,
Love instead of hate.
Hear the tramp of millions;
Nor bombs nor cannon roar
Only men awakened,
Aliens by birth—
Overwhelming legions
To seize and free the earth!
Rising are the millions:
Nor fear nor hope can bar.
Not for gods or dogmas
Not for words their fight.
Singleness of purpose—
Might befriends their right.
Race nor creed divide them,
Gathering near and far;
Puissant come the millions,
Captained by their need.
Thought and care are leading
Earth to wrench from Greed!
War's for gain forever;
Then let the gain be ours.
Keep the braid and tinsel,
All the minted gold;
Earth alone we’re taking—
A War Song for Men
Birthright of the bold!
Scorn your death devices,
Greed's infernal powers;
Life itself we’re seeking!
This our first command,
Pealing now as thunder—
Open ye the land!
Rise the famished millions
Driven off the land;
Spurning peace or plunder,
Seeking lust nor loot.
Thralls to sloth no longer
The millions sluff the brute.
Upright humans hungry,
Fearlessly they band,
Codes nor laws nor titles!
O, governments, beware—
Heed the need of millions—
Men who know and dare!
32
Songs of The Great Adventure
THE WHITE MAN’S TOTEM
Paper titles to idle acres
Are the crime and shame
Of christendom—
Its prisons and brothels
Paupers and billionaires!
Paper titles to idle oil lands
Are gasoline at 20 cents
Plus the wage slaveries
Disemployment and slums
Of civilization.
Paper titles to idle acres
Are the white man’s idol
His totem and fetish
His bloody sacrifice
Of women and children!
Songs of The Great Adventure 33
THAT THE LAND BE OPENED TO MAN
That the land be opened to the people.
That every adult stand in actu or potenitally on
his own piece of earth
From which only death can dislodge him.
That the whole people say to Greed:
“The parent privilege is dead: the primal mo-
nopoly has ceased: the base of exploitation
is destroyed.
All have access to the earth without toll or
price.”
That the people say to Ignorance:
“We have changed the system of land tenure, on
which rested your power to enslave.
Every man shall own himself, and by the privi-
lege to withhold land shall no man have
the power to own another.
The unused earth is free.”
And if Doubt and Envy linger to question:
“Why one man will have better land than an-
other—acres more fertile, lots nearer mar-
ket, sites more pleasing for residence?”
A child may answer: “Those who hold the bet-
ter sites will gladly, freely equalize the
difference to others—when exploitation's
necessity no longer stifles the better im-
pulses: ’tis a detail that free men will
settle in a manly way.”
And the people say:
“But never again shall Greed or Ignorance gain
34 Songs of The Great Adventure
power to rack-rent, distrain, wage-slave,
pauperize, and disemploy the millions
Thru the primal curse of land monopoly.”
And if Doubt or Doctrine hesitate and ask:
“How then with railroads, carriers, utilities,
banks, trusts, and mines?”
Even the Child may answer: “How about them
now? Free land will not increase their
power.”
And the Student will interpose to say: “Free
land will greatly or entirely destroy their
power of exploitation. What is left we
can then consider.” "
That the whole people say to Greed and Ignor-
all Ce:
“There shall be no mortgage on the bare land,
nor any title thereto but use and occu-
pance; land is to live on, cultivate, and
develop—not for speculation.
None shall own or hold of earth an inch more
than he can use: every idle lot or acre shall
be as free as air and sun to him who needs
it for a home, a store, a workshop, a gar-
den, or a farm.”
And if the Disputer arise with, “But— If–”
He shall be silenced by a child again:
“These are not issues for slaves to settle. Free
men each with a foothold on the soil will
settle them in a bold, kind, free way—let
us not doubt.”
And the Student will add: “Every social and
industrial problem, nay most of the psycho-
logic problems too, that men now rack
their ingenuity to solve, will under free
That the Land Be Opened 35
land assume entirely different aspects—
Free land will change the surface and the heart
of civilization.”
That the Human Heart thunder to the world:
“Poverty is dead. Disemployment is ended. The
earth is open.
The poor, the weak, the ignorant, the blind shall
never be trampled and vampirized again
by the withholding of the unused land—
For I have bared the bosom of earth to man and
in her breasts is sustenance inexhaustible.”
36 Songs of The Great Adventure
OMITTED FROM THE SPOON RIVER
ANTHOLOGY
I was the leading singletaxer in Spoon River
I organized its first singletax club
I once saw Henry George himself
And I knew Louis F. Post
And Daniel Kiefer.
I wrote articles for the press
About taxation problems,
Was a fluent talker
And could prove the falsities of Karl Marx
to anybody
But a socialist.
I was called the John Z. White
Of Spoon River.
We had a flourishing club,
With after dinner lectures and discussions
One a month—regular.
And weekly luncheons at which we discussed
the shipping bill or the currency question
And entertained any noted person
Who came to Spoon River.
Singletax became favorably known
To the Better Elements of Society.
The congregational minister
Preached a sermon on it.
We had a debate at the high school,
“Resolved that singletax is scientific.”
We had an exclusive membership
Of cultured persons
Omitted from Spoon River 37
Tirelessly devoted to the cause of
Rational taxation.
If I had lived another year
I would have gone to the legislature
Where I could have scrutinized
Every measure
In its relation to the Philosophy
Of singletax.
But there arose in our midst
A band of irresponsible agitators
Who stirred up the people
To open the land!
They were emotionalists 4.
And would not discuss calmly a compromise
with those who do not care for the immediate
Practise of their preaching.
They ranted about the army of disemployed,
About women driven to prostitution,
Men toiling for a pittance,
Children as wage slaves,
Babes starving.
They joined with socialists,
Anarchists, syndicalists, I.W.W’s—
People like that!
With anybody who would struggle
To change the land tenure
To use and occupancy
Right away!
I opposed them eloquently
And with stratagem
For their radical demands
Would alienate from our Cause
The growing tolerance of the corporations
and business men,
38 Songs of The Great Adventure
The interest of the politicians
And the curiosity of club women.
Bankers, leading citizens, the daily press
Would view us with distrust.
Could anything be worse
For the success of a Forward Movement?
I tried to rally the old war horses
To stand by their colors
And preserve the sacred
And respectable
Singletax philosophy
In unsullied purity
From these anarchists
And disturbers.
But the agitators
Had the voting strength,
So Mrs. Jonesburg and I resigned
And started a Singletax Philomathic Society
For the discussion of proper methods
To alleviate poverty
Three-quarters of an inch a year
Without causing any annoyance
To Existing Conditions.
If I had lived
We might have rehabilitated
Singletax in respectable circles.
But the idea
Of unscientific people
Led by agitators
Demanding the whole earth
Immediately!
Was too great a shock.
Omitted from Spoon River 39
They said I died
Of heart failure.
But I don’t understand that
For the autopsy surgeons
Couldn’t find such an organ
And said it had probably
Been absorbed
In my brain development.
40 Songs of The Great Adventure
WHAT'S IT TO YOUP
What is it to you
That children starve in a land of plenty
That girls are driven to the street for food and
shelter
And idle men tramp unused acres
And broken human lives strew every pathway—
What is it to You?
Not only the rich are guilty
Of the pauperism that degrades humanity
But You, and all, who assent,
Who do less than the most you can do
To stay it. Your hands are red
With the blood of discouraged, starved,
Women, children, and men—your own kin.
The guilt is Yours especially who Knowing
The cause of pauperism
Do less than you might do to stay it.
What is it to you that children starve
Women whore, men steal or beg or tramp
Merely for bread—in a land of Wondrous Plenty—
What is it to You?
Songs of the Great Adventure 41
CALIFORNIA
Now
And as it has been for many shameful years.
In a land of wondrous plenty,
Richer than the Indies,
Children hunger— Maids
For bread or ribbons ply the street,
Mothers drudge or steal or starve,
Or whore—yes, for merely food and shelter!
(Who make the thing shall hear the word)
Whores for bread!—thousands, thousands
In a land richer than the Indies!
Why
For lack of Faith and Courage in those who Knew
For that the earth and all
Its natural plenty—its idle, unused chances,
Its mines and wood and streams,
And fairest, waiting acres—all the
Source of every human need or heart's desire—
Its rent and city value—its crops—its wondrous
yield!
All are held by ancient paper titles—
(Dead hands that clutch the living)—held
By a few—from the many—and most held idle,
Held away from idle, needy, Living human
beings!
And Then—
The People of the State of California do enact as follows:
That Every child have play and plenty
Every mother All her needs
Every girl her ribbons and her beau
42 Songs of The Great Adventure
Every boy—A Chance to Win!
Every man have equal access
To the earth, its acres, mines and trees
Reaping All he sows!
That human faces upward turning
Every soul may grow and darel
New Bottles
44 New Bottles
EARTHPS GOD
The Living God stands forth in human birth!
In fearlessness no power His Will can girth
To hasten evolution’s toiling way,
Release the millions, paradise the earth!
MAN’S GOD
When sundered chains release the prisoned mind;
When hearts their secret dungeon Prisoner find
And free!—'Tis He; ’tis only He who can
Raze prison walls and fear-bound man unbind!
New Bottles 45
SELF RESPECT
No man is better than I am,
This I affirm, and dare you to prove
That any man
Is better than I am.
No man is worse than I am,
This I admit
And challenge you to show
A baser man than I am.
All crimes I have thought
All virtues I have felt.
I am greedy, voluptous, deceitful,
I am generous, true, and courageous.
We are different shallowly,
Not better or worse underneath.
We are what circumstance makes us,
None is better than I am, and no one worse.
46
New Bottles
THE UNIKNOWN
Life is greater than philosophy,
Than all the schools
And systems of thought,
Than all the logicians
Dead or living.
I like to think
No child will ever be born
On a day when
All the secrets of nature
Are known
And men can read
All knowledge
In a printed book.
Such a little universe
Would stifle me
Who find the zest
The urge and the joy
Of Life
In the vastness of the Unknown.
Life is vaster than all
The creeds, doctrines, theologies,
Moralities, religions
And philosophies—
Than all the saviors,
Saints, gods, sages,
Wise men and fools,
Dead, living,
Or yet to be born,
Life has had a billion
Times a billion Interpreters
The Unknown 47
On this little planet alone
And remains—Unknown
Every sentient creature.
Is an interpreter of Life
And every one interprets
A little differently.
In this lies not despair
Or even sadness.
In this lurks the lure of Life
And the Why thereof.
The deeper, truer, bigger
Joys of Life
Accrue from its
Fearless exploration.
Life would be a prison cell
For the human mind
Shut in by the printed page.
Every soul brings
New problems to Life—
Multiplies its wonderful mysteries.
Life would be a dungeon
To the human soul
Could the printed page
Lessen the vastness *
Of the Unknown.
New Bottles
THE ONLY REVOLUTIONARY
Love is the only Revolutionary.
Not a supine submissive love—
A bold audacious Love
That dares anything, everything,
Even the loss of Dollars! !
To gain its darling end.
A Love that lays Profit,
Stocks, bonds and dividends
On the altar of its heart’s desire.
Its own stocks, and bonds,
And Profit—
On the altar of Human Welfare!
Such a Love there is in life;
Millions of men feel it,
And daily it shapes
The course of their lives—
Only in little ineffectual ways
Because—
Our aimless, thoughtless
Way of land hogging
Denies Love at the base
And beginning of life,
Bringing to naught,
Turning to ashes
Turning to fear,
To unfaith, cruelty
And self-righteous littleness
All the fruit that ripens
From our fondest, boldest,
New Bottles 49
Broadest human love.
Where human life begins
We will carry our Love
And end the shameless,
Heartless barter
Of human flesh and soul
For bread or dividends.
AS TO HATE
I don’t hate the spider that I kill,
But hate the narrow life I lead
In which there isn’t room enough
For a spider and myself.
The soldier doesn’t hate the foe he slays,
Nor the lion hate the lamb he eats,
I will not hate the men whose
tenure of earth
Has pauperized the millions—
50 New Bottles
THE NATIVITY
Plead not with heaven’s alien Gods to bless
Some Holy Babe and Mother far away.
Be thou thyself the God whose power shall stay
With human sympathy and love’s access
Whom never Gods bend earthward to caress—
The Hungry Babes and Mothers of Today!
Seek thou the Lowly Mothers first, for they
Need most the touch of manhood’s tenderness.
Round every Infant brow an aureole gleams
However starved by Greed's brutality.
The holy Mother in each Mother dreams
Above the Infant cradled on her knee.
Sing not of ancient Gods and ancient themes—
All Babes enshrine whatever Gods there be!
E"reely adapted from one of Alys Thompson’s sonnet
sequences in The Year’s Rosary.
New Bottles 51
THE ONLY DANGER
Fear is the World Lust!
Obsessing human life—
Poisoning its springs of desire,
Glooming its sunlight of love,
Trailing its shadows
Over every natural joy that bursts
The heavy bonds of superstition.
Sans Fear life is worth while.
Fear is the Serpent in the Garden!
Fascinating the soul
To weakness and despair,
Drawing the feet
Always in lessening arcs
To the tomb's embrace.
Death were cheated but for Fear.
Fear is the Mother of Sin!
Dashing to the mud
The soul’s reach starward;
Defiling the Garden's
Rose-laden air
With stench of the Puritan.
On the warp of Fear is woven
All that swineherds call sin.
Fear dethrones the true God!
Robs man of faith in—Himself!
Skulking Fear
Of pain, of death, of loss—
Ignoble Fear to stand alonel
Sans Fear of tomorrow
Man will reach his Godhood.
52 New Bottles
THE ONLY VIRTUE
That pluck abide with kindness,
Courage stay with thought,
Daring and decency be friends,
Intelligence evade mushiness,
Sympathy sidestep impotence,
Love remain virile to the end.
That the strength and the hardness of steel
In the hour for action
Come from the deeps of Men
Who can think and feel !
That brutality, sentimentality,
Aimlessness, stupidity, froth,
With cunning, greed and gluttony,
Be not the sole possessors
Of manhood's only virtue—
Courage!
New Bottles 53
TO KEEP THE IDEAL
Have you a love that you would keep?
Pour it out into a larger love. ,
Have you a friendship you would hold?
Share it with the world.
Have you an ideal you would not lose?
Lay it on the Altar to Man.
Nothing is an end in itself.
Everything is only a means to something else.
Satiety is the only sin.
Only what is given can be kept.
What is hoarded turns to Ashes.
Nothing is stationary.
Treasure grows or lessens.
This is true of a love, a friendship, or an ideal.
To keep it, share it.
Love is not an end in itself,
But a means of human growth.
Everything is for use,
Nothing is “for keeps.”
Things, qualities, thoughts, feelings—
The world and its contents
Tangible and imponderable—
Are for the growth of Man.
You have heard this before
And gushed over it, no doubt.
Now stop the gush and get it into your system
Live it! Save your love,
Hold your friendship,
Keep your ideal
By use!
54
New Bottles
ANTINOMIES
I will not ask of Life
More than I am
Willing to pay for.
I will not seek
To be drunk and sober
At the same moment—
Drunk of wine, women, thought,
music, poetry, of the wild
splendors of nature, or the
beautiful creations of art.
I will not ask of Life
Joy without effort,
Health without care,
Wealth without work,
The approval of my neighbors
Without consideration
For their welfare.
I will not seek in Life
For the blending of opposites,
Nor an ultimate God.
I will not expect
Gluttony without satiety,
Drink without remorse,
Excess without lassitude,
Anger without regret,
Hate without grief.
I will seek no thornless Rose,
Nor curse heaven
At the scratches.
New Bottles 55
I will seek the essence
Of the Rose
And avoid its thorns—
When I can.
A MAN’S PRAYER
O distant God
If Thou art in heaven
Or anywhere—
I don’t know.
Thou hast not revealed
Thyself to me—
Yet hopefully,
Anxious to miss no point—
O alien God
If Thou art outside of man
Give me power to combat
The bigotry hate envy
Of Thy devotees,
The tortures crimes cruelties
Perpetrated
For Thy glory.
56
New Bottles
THE OLD ART
The old art makes man
The scapegoat
Of creeds, conventions, moralities,
Gloats over the soul’s efforts
To disentangle itself
From artificial codes.
THE NEW ART
The new art leaves man
Above moralities,
And seeks its unities
In the human struggle
Out of the web
Of the exploiter's conventions.
New Bottles 57
LIFE LURES
Life lures
To fresh endeavors.
Is it only a lure?
Life beckons
To new adventures.
Must all fail?
Life reveals
Higher aspirations.
Shall none satisfy?
Life shows
Another peak—
Yes, the peaks are endless.
Mountains pile
On mountains—
Still a higher summit.
Life leads
Upward, upward—
If one be unafraid!
Life—halts
The climber and says
Take the crowd along!
What a lonely
Heaven, with
Only one soul in it!
58 New Bottles
THE BLIND GODDESS
Symbol of a darker age—
Hewn by men who feared the gods;
Nor sensed the Silver Thread
Nor knew the bond of kinship.
She holds the scales of Shylock
To weigh a pound of human flesh.
Symbol of the Jealous God—
Conceived by Envy
That hoards its own and counts
The crumbs eaten by another.
Scales weigh only gold and goods,
Scales weigh never motive.
Symbol of the tradesman's age—
When things count more than humans
And children’s flesh balances dividends
And property weighs more than life or hope.
Lust and hate alone are blind.
Love sees with a million eyes.
Symbol of superstition—
Born in the night of man's great fear,
Sponsored by monk and mercenary,
Dipped in the blood of heretics.
There is no justice without mercy,
Care, thought, understanding, and love.
Symbol of materiality—
Chiseled by bound slaves
To weigh surfaces and appearances;
Blind—all blind—to the Inner God.
Sign of slave and tyrant—
Give us the emblem of Democracy.
The Blind Goddess 59
Symbol of submission—
Fashioned by men afraid to love;
Denial of man's divinity. Serving
The ancient Greed and the modern Privilege.
Give us a marble cut by free men.
Give us a symbol with a Soul!
60 New Bottles
HUMILITY
Humility is the crowning virtue.
Dare slaves assume it?
The attribute of gods, kings, rulers—even of one
who might rule self!
On the brow of the mighty having power over all
Humility is the brightest jewel in the last and
most resplendent sceptre.
Dare slaves reach for it?
Humility—so large a jewel—
Would bow the head of God Almighty
So he could see the chains of slaves
And strike them off.
By this sign ye shall know the True God—
That having all power he ask nothing
And raise all men to his stature!
Humility never graced the life of slave or
underling:
Servility bows them.
Subaltern and slave whose breasts burnt not
With hot flames of unceasing
Rebellion—
Who patiently wait, submit, and argue
While children toil and women starve
Amid plenty—
Know not humility, but Cowardice!
New Bottles 61
WANTED — MEN
Wanted—Men!
Able-bodied men,
Bold-hearted men,
To enlist in a holy war
Against poverty.
Wanted—Men!
To fight for
Women and children
As bravely as
For kings and queens.
Wanted—Men!
A million men
To brave death and torture
Gallows and prisons—
To dethrone Privilege.
Wanted—Men!
To dare as much for human
beings in America
As for property “rights”
In Europe.
Wanted—Men!
To wrest from
Greed and monopoly
The unused land of America—
Men unafraid.
62
New Bottles
NO MAN’S KEEPER
I am no man's keeper.
No jail keys
Rattle in my head
Or heart.
If I am not
My brother's helper
When I may be
The loss is equally my own.
I will keep no one—
His conscience
His judgment
Or his earnings.
Keepers bring jails
And gallows.
Keepers are tyrants
In hate or in love.
Not your way, but mine
Would I go—kindly.
The soul hungers most
For Self expression.
The urge of life
Is to Individual difference.
Keepers, in love or hate,
Make the discord—
Sad confusion of thought
That harbors the exploiter!
Man is his brother's helper,
Not his keeper.
New Bottles 63
To help is love's way:
Anon to bind a wound;
Usually not to rob
And never to hinder.
THAT I MAY STRIVE
That I may die in strife
'Gainst slavery!
Teeth set, hands clenched
To every static bond
In christendom.
That death find me
Far out from the ranks,
Strike quick
And fell me face forward,
Hating all that limits man.
Life's joy is its strife,
The battle 'gainst odds
Its oil, its wine, and its bread:
O! to fall under fire
And escape a smug death in bed!
64
New Bottles
A NEW VALOR
A new valor stirs the blood
Of Men.
They shall despoil
The strong, the rich, the mighty,
Whoever hath overmuch
Where many starve.
Boldly, with conscious dignity
Men shall rob the over-rich.
It is taught that
Love shall be slavish
And kindness meek.
On this is founded
The christian cruelties.
But the new valor
Brings power to Love,
And daring to kindness.
The old valor saith
That from those who have not
Shall be taken
And to those who have
Shall be given more.
Thus do the christians
As told in their books—
The creed of cravens.
Thus is it written in ink
By long-dead hands
Palsied with fear,
In tonnes rotten
Of the centuries’ dust.
The moving Finger writes
A New Valor 65
In blood
From the heart of Men.
And it says:
Kindness shall be
Bolder than hate!
It stirs a new valor
In men unafraid
Who shall despoil the rich
And unseat Profit
That all may have enough.
The new valor stirs
To action |
The weak, the ignorant
Shall not be robbed
By the cunning.
Kindness shall thunder
To lust: You alone
Shall be robbed.
And the voice will
Be heard!
The lowly and the poor
Shall not be coddled—
Thus do the christians
In charity—
But hear ye the
Thunder of Kindness:
They shall not be robbed!
66
New Bottles
HATE IS FORCE
Hate is a strong force.
I will hate the chains of men—
The institutions, superstitions,
And conditions that bind them.
A good hater is a strong man—
But I will not hate myself,
Which is part of all other selves.
I will hate things, not men.
I will hate gods, creeds, states,
And all that belittles Man.
I will hate words and ideas
That enslave men.
Who hate men have little hate
For the chains that bind them,
And little force or care
To break the chains
At whatever cost.
New Bottles 67
BE STRONG FIRST
Masters teach their slaves
To “turn the other cheek”
When they are beaten.
But the new valor
Will brook no blow.
Masters teach their slaves
To be long-suffering
Under oppression.
But the new valor
Will slay the oppressor.
Masters teach their slaves
Be good, be moral,
And you shall have
First choice of the crumbs
From our table.
But the new valor says
Be strong, be bold,
And rout your masters—
Only strength is good,
And weakness sin.
Only strength can win.
Be strong first!
Life and the world
And all their good
Are for the strong.
68
New Bottles
THE NEW POWER
O then to Think
Means not to Feel?
The Head must not
Take counsel of the Heart?
Thus teach the christians.
Thought in one tank,
Feeling in another—
Ce n'est pas comme il faut
To mingle thought and feeling
In a single act.
So do the christians.
But a new light flashes
To pierce the christian gloom—
A wondrous birth—
From the union
Of Head and Heart.
Lo, the Intellect
And the Soul are wed!
Coward Words go tumbling
To the ash heap,
And Deeds accomplish
The new birth is Sympathy.
Froth of easy sentiment
And cruelty of intellect
It banishes: the child
Of the fusion leads!
The bank wants human feeling,
Religion's lack is thought.
The New Power 69
The market-place needs poetry.
Art needs sense and depth and care.
Slavery lurks in aimlessness!
Lo, the Heart and Head
Are wedded!
Come—
To Greed a bolder foe,
To Love a deeper meaning,
To the Many, at last, Power!
New Bottles
THE LOVE OF GOLD OR THE
LOVE OF MAN
I never knew a man
Who feared not the alien God
Nor loved him, but was the kinder
To his neighbor
And had a fine, firm
Faith in Men.
I never knew a thief
Or forger but feared an alien God
And loved him—
A sneak, a pimp, or
A detective, but confessed
A distant God and feared him.
Maybe
(Tho I have not met one)
An “atheist” could also
Be cold and vicious,
But the million babes in arms
And playful children
Are starved and tortured
In the name of a heavenly
God and Jesus.
In the love of the alien God
Lies the hate of man
And full extenuation
For all the bloody murder
The weeping, christian world
Has ever seen.
Love of Gold or Man 71
The “love of God”
Means the love of Gold
And ever has, by far and large,
And ever must.
The “love of God”
Brings the love of Gold.
For man cannot
Love an Abstraction.
The human heart impinges
Seeks the Tangible.
In God the heart is cheated,
And the cheated heart
Turns to Gold.
I announce a new faith,
A new hope,
A new religion
(Older than the hills)—
The love of Men!
72
New Bottles
HATE GODS, LOVE MEN
Ye are taught to love gods—
The creed of slaves.
Ye shall be masters of self
And of none other than self,
When ye shall cease to
Love any god and center
Hope and thought and love
And interest on Man.
Ye are taught to fear gods—
Dogmas of cowardice.
Those who fear neither
God nor Satan
Are your masters and exploiters.
Ye shall fear nothing.
Ye shall cease to fear
And dare all.
Ye shall find Self
Each man himself—
When all gods under all aliases
Shall be dethroned.
Not law, evolution, the state,
Prosperity, posterity,
Progress, or providence—
But Man (each to himself)
Shall be first.
Ye shall hate gods and love Men.
Ye shall love even Self
And seek self-interest first;
Not behind lying cant
As do the christians,
Hate Gods, Love Men 73
But openly and with
Much pains to discover
The real interests of Self.
Ye shall know Self
The true Self
The whole Self
The body, mind, and soul
Of self—when gods are forgotten
And care and thought
Are centered
On Man!
In the love of gods
Lies the hate of Man,
For none serves two masters.
The hate of Man
Breeds the needless grief
And pain unutterable
Of christendom—
Hate gods and love Men.
In the fear of gods
Lie sin and weakness.
Here is true valor:
That ye fear not the Unknown.
Fearless of which ye shall be
Strong for the tortures
And prisons of Greed
And attain—Comradeship.
New Bottles
THE MASTER MOTIVE
Superficial appeals to the human crowd
Its pocket-book and its cupidity
Its business interests, personal advantage,
Will bring superficial results
A million of which multiplied by a million
Will not produce a profundity—
Nor a tangible inch of freedom.
Human freedom is the profoundest thing
The heart and mind can reach
Or has any decent right to try to reach
While human lives are wrecked by Greed
Every day and hour before our eyes—
While the mortality and destitution of Profit
Exceeds the death roll of the world war.
When the primal passions
Are stirred the mass will Act,
Unitedly and spontaneously
To compass great and vital issues
For good or for ill
For construction or destruction
For Death or for Life!
º: . . . .
So moves the human mass
So is it moved toward the Ideal
By the inextinguishable human Urge
For Something—something Better
Than the personal end—
It knows not what
But is spurred ever by the Ideal.
So is the human mass.
Would you move it
The Master Motive 75
To its own unfoldment—
From the damned death psychology
Of Profits’ world war?
Touch its heart.
The greatest, strongest, deepest
Primal instinct of every being
The “master motive of human action”
The “force of forces”
That alone can reach freedom
Is the impulse of expansion—
We call it Love.
Not the servile patient
Slave “love” of christian theology.
By that rules the Exploiter.
The deep unfearing audacious Love
That sees the Goal alone
Leaps the chasm blindly
Fells like fire the Foe.
Nothing less will break the war spell
Or stem the wave of slaughter
For greed of wealth,
Or turn the mass thought
From Death machines
To welfare—
To life and hope and growth.
Nothing less will gain
An inch of human freedom
Or strike the chains from wage slaves
Or turn the children
And the nursing mothers from the alleys
To a free and open earth.
Nothing less!
76
New Bottles
THE STATE
The strength of the State
Is the weakness of the People—
Its wealth is their poverty
Its dignity is their degradation.
Mighty State—
Little Manhood!
Rome reared its splendor
On sixty million slaves.
The pomp of the State
Is the servility of the People—
Its pride is their shame
Its glitter is their gloom.
The State is a superstition,
Heartless, bloodless, beingless
Save as it draws sustenance
From living creatures.
The palaces of the State
Are the hovels, the slums,
And the mortgaged homes
Of the People.
The richest State
Means the poorest People
And the greatest cruelty
Of the few to the many.
The Naked Truth
The Naked Truth
STARK WINTER
In the summer
I will sing of flowers
And fling pretty phrases
At the hearts
Of fair women.
I will image palaces of hope
And social structures
Where human beings
Might live and strive
Without hate.
In the summer
When the pulse throbs
Atune with earth’s
Creative impulse.
In the winter
As thru a lense I see
Life's barbarities and superstitions
Focalized.
I see broken lives,
Starving children,
Mortgaged homes;
Love lost or defiled
For profit or for bread;
Power’s cruelty to the weak.
I long for the summer
Of roses and hope,
But may the winter of reality
Ever stir me to act.
For only action
Brings the Ideal.
The Naked Truth 79
WHO ARE THE STRONGP
Is it Great to mulct the little,
Or Fine to cheat the poor?
Do the Strong oppress the lowly,
Wring taxes from the landless?
Does Strength beat cripples,
Or Courage starve women?
Is it Masterful to strike the blind,
Or crush a weakling?
Such is christian valor—
To hang the daring bandit,
Enrich and honor
The craven exploiter!
We cripple the weak,
Trample the meek,
Despoil the ignorant,
Starve the infant at birth.
Even charity is graft.
And we boast
Of Strength and Courage!
Who are the Strong?
80
The Naked Truth
BE TRUTHFUL
Lie to others if you must—
To the jealous wife,
The importune creditor.
It will save you
Much trouble
If you don’t.
But—if you must—
Lie to your tradesmen
And your mistress—
Sell goods by lying,
Gain what you will
By falsehood—
So wags the world.
Or appears to.
But—
Tell yourself the truth.
“I am a knave and a liar,”
Say often.
Deceive others if you must,
Tho courage finds it seldom necessary—
But—
“I am a liar and a knave”
Say to yourself
Frequently.
It is better not to lie
Very much. But—
Tell yourself the truth!
Be Truthful 81
No one is wholly
Truthful, in christendom—
But don’t lie to yourself.
“I am a scoundrel”—
Say it often in secret.
You are!
Who is not in christendom?
Don’t lie
To yourself.
BUSINESS
I am a business man.
I must cheat, haggle, exploit.
Ninety-five per cent of us fail
Because we cannot kill
All our human qualities
And remain to the end tricksters and brutes.
I am a business man.
In my heart I loathe it.
Deep within me was a hunger
For life and love and friendship
That I have almost strangled.
I am a business man.
Who has Succeeded!
After long years of bitter strife
And preying on the weak
I have won these Ashes.
82
The Naked Truth
CULTURE
I am tired of art and beauty
And all their tinsel twaddle;
I am tired of logic and philosophy
And all their endless chatter;
I am heart-sick and soul-tired
Of Culture—
While a million children starvel
BOTTOM FACTS
They seize the earth—
its ore, coal, oil, and
timber, hold the larger
part idle and sell the
product for what they
please: that’s the bottom
fact of High Prices.
They seize the earth—
its unused fertile acres,
and hold them out of use,
which crowds the city
with workers who must
bid against each other for
jobs: that’s the bottom
fact of Low Wages.
The Naked Truth 83
I AMI FREE
I am free
To choose, sometimes,
Which master of the earth
I may elect to serve.
I am free
To sell myself, if I can find a buyer,
For enough to feed
And clothe myself.
I am free
To beg, or steal, if I can,
Or starve—
In a land glutted with wealth.
I am free
To pinch and screw and save
And give the best energies of my life
Merely to gain a roof.
I am free
To wander homeless
Over twenty-three hundred million acres mostly
vacant, unused,
In search of a job.
I am free
To push out a worker
And take a job
From one whose need may be greater than mine.
I am free
To be a prostitute, beggar, thief,
Or to tramp with the disemployed.
The Naked Truth
PREPAREDNESS
Thieves go well armed.
Assassins, detectives
Manhunters
Must always be prepared
Against invasion—
A troublesome necessity
Of their calling.
Houses that shelter
Stolen goods,
Houses that sell
Woman's bodies,
Homes of the insane,
Jails and penitentiaries
Need guns, bars, and guards
Violence always threatens.
Homes of billionaires
Where are gathered
In monstrous superfluity
Wealth rended from
Countless broken lives
And homeless paupers—
Need a vast army
To protect them.
Banks that hoard
Working capital
From tradesmen
Until their necessities
Wring blood usury
Need more than time locks
And steel vaults
To save them.
Preparedness 85
Titles to idle acres,
Mortgages on homes,
The penal code,
Privileges and monopolies,
Sweatshops,
Slums
Gallows—
Need much “preparedness.”
The house of exploitation
Is safeguarded
By murder.
Despoliation fattens
On the war psychology.
Chains rattle
Above the roar
Of death machinery.
The Naked Truth
THREE BLOOD BROTHERS
I
I
I
am Palaver—
Of many aliases:
Security of the State,
National Honor,
Civilization, Humanity—
The spoken or written
Word, to which
The Individual
Is forever sacrificed
By Greed.
I am Cant the hypocrite,
Loved and feared
By ignorance
II
am Patriotism—
Provincial and bigoted;
Hating all but my own,
Ready to persecute
And murder
For a word or a look
Alien to my understanding.
I am the little heart
And the narrow brain.
I am ignorance, creed,
And the church.
I am he who kills
And dies for Greed.
The Naked Truth 87
III
I am Profit—
The modern Moloch,
The western Juggernaut,
The only essential
Individualist
The world has ever known.
For me all things exist
And all creatures.
On my altars
Are spread
The life of childhood,
The heart of manhood,
The souls of women.
88 The Naked Truth
WE’RE GOING TO HANG A BOY IN
CALIFORNIA
We’re going to hang a boy—
Twelve men, a regular physician, a schooled
jurist, and a cityfull of righteous people have
condemned—a boy of eighteen.
Whom the wisest of earth, its saviors, prophets,
and sages, have refrained from judging;
whom the Central Figure of the era (in
whose name the nations are filled with
temples) admonished the world to “Judge
Not”—twelve men, a regular physician, a
schooled jurist, and a cityfull of righteous
people have not only judged but condemned
—a boy of eighteen.
We're going to hang a boy—
Not in passion’s blinding mists, or youth's high
fever that riots thru distended veins and over-
throws the inner God.
Not in lightning spur to lust of blood—the quick
flowering of an atavistic germ from cave and
forest.
Not for a sudden clot that bursts a tiny vein
and floods a lobe and clouds the mental vision.
Not for a flashing impact on a nerve that
reaches from the spleen and dethrones the
clay's master.
We're going to hang a boy—
To uphold the majesty of the law, maintain the
dignity of the State—a boy of eighteen—to
prove that California is an order-loving
commonwealth.
We're Going to Hang a Boy 89
Three million people against a boy of eighteen.
We will hang him to prove our courage, our
virtue, and our civilization.
And the church of Jesus Christ is approvingly
silent.
We're going to hang a boy—
A jury, a doctor, and a “Daniel come to
judgment” have condemned a boy—read his
heart, searched his soul, pierced the secret
chambers of his mind, laid bare the human
ego, and found it all bad!
A jury, a doctor of physics, and a Daniel, have
measured the surging impulses of hot youth,
balanced the force of impact and impulsion,
read the record of the motor brain areas—
And found the boy sane and bad—quite sane and
all bad, and have ordered him hanged.
We're going to hang a boy—
We hope. The sentence may not stand—ah,
well, we have had our orgie.
We have gloated at the spectacle in court.
The mother moaned, the sister screamed, the
boy was bold—then cowed by the brave and
manly judge, he trembled, hid his face in his
hands, as the fatal words of the learned judge
fell—manly, learned, righteous judge—(I’d
rather be a wolf.)
Tho the hangman be cheated, we have had
our orgie.
We have heard the mother moan, the sister
scream, and seen the boy tremble!
We're going to hang a boy—
A bad boy. Why is he bad, because he murdered?
Then is he sane because he murdered? Or
did he murder because he was sane?
90 The Naked Truth
Did the doctor measure the boy's sanity by his
own? Would the doctor do murder? Is it
only fear of hanging that keeps the doctor
from murdering? Then the boy were a braver
soul. If the doctor will consider why he
would not murder, he will reach a truer
measure of the boy’s sanity.
If the doctor has a better test of sanity than
murder is, he is wiser than God.
We're going to hang a boy—
Unless the supreme court intervenes—or the
governor.
Why are we going to hang the boy? To show
that murder is wrong?—but we are going to
murder him. Murder means killing. We are
going to kill the boy—we hope—
We kill to show that killing is wrong. We are
not only a brave people—three million against
one boy; we are also a sensible, rational, in-
telligent people.
If it is wrong to kill, why do we kill?
We're going to hang a boy—
Eighteen years from God. Take him back,
God, he’s bad, all bad, not fit to live with the
three million inhabitants of California.
Murder is right; we are going to murder a boy.
It’s the boy that’s bad, not murder.
Why is the boy bad? because he is sane; if he
were not sane he would not be bad and we
would not hang him.
Take him back, God—we reject him; he's all bad
—a bad boy not fit to live with us.
We're going to hang a boy—
Why are we going to hang him; because in a
We're Going to Hang a Boy 91
hot flash he did murder? O, no; we are going
to murder him—in cold blood—deliberately.
Because he is sane? Many are sane and do
murder and are not hanged—those who
murder scores for profit, in a cheaply pro-
tected mine drift, or because life-boats are
expensive.
Because he is bad? Many bad people are not
. hanged. Because he is bad, sane, and a
murderer? Many have been all these and
were not hanged.
Why were they not hanged? Because they
were very Wealthy!
We’re going to hang a boy—
Because he is poor! His people haven’t much
money.
If this bad, sane boy were the child of multi-
millionaires do you think he would have been
sentenced to hang?
If you do you are very guileless.
If the boy’s father were very rich he could
have engaged the services of a dozen eminent
psychiatrists who would have testified
(truthfully) that the boy was insane.
We are going to hang the boy because he is
Poor!
92 The Naked Truth
WHERE ARE THE WOMEN OF
CALIFORNIA
Where are the women of California—
The wise matrons, the honored sisters, the
virtuous wives, and the enlightened spinsters
Who gained the ballot to uplift society?
Where are the women milder and truer than
men, of deeper impulse and wider sympathy?
Where are the enfranchised women, while the
gallows is building
On which to hang a boy?
Where are the women of California—
More humane and benign than men, with ten-
dered sensibilities and nobler purpose to
humanize society, soften its barbarous customs
and replace its ancient cruelties with decenter
statutes than those of fang and claw?
Where is the gentler sex with purer love and
higher instincts to lead mankind from savage
passions and primitive blood-lust?
Doesn’t it hear the dull stroke of the hammer
in the old lumber room of San Quentin?
Where are the women of California—
With the mother hunger for every mother's son
in distress and hate for none—
Who value the life of youth more than the
jungle law of revenge?
Where are the mothers whose ways are kinder
and wiser than those of the hangman?
Where is the noble motherhood, the gentle
sisterhood, the precious maternal instinct—
Where Are the Women? 93
Where do they hide that they cannot hear the
building of the gallows on which two sons of
mothers are to be hanged?
One of twenty-three and one of eighteen?
Where are the million mothers of California?
Where are the women of California—
Who will not hypocritically hide their lust of
revenge
By fatuously asking, What else can we do with
a boy who kills another?
Where are the women whose love for the un-
slain, and care for those who have not killed,
is stronger than their hate of a mentally
weak boy? -
Where are the wise women of impersonal view
who will discourage murder by suppressing
the state’s example of murder?
Where are the women who loathe murder more
than the blind victims thereof 2
Where are the women of California—
Whose finer feminine intuitions have raised
them above the brute instincts of men?
Where are the women who will bring moral
vigor to civilization and lure us away from the
fear and hate of cave days—
The women less crude and cruel than the
shrinking low-browed males of California
who have no shame to hang a boy?
Where are the women, better than men, to save
a boy from the gallows?
Where are the women of California—
Whose sympathies are wider than their skirts—
Their mentalities stronger than their love of
tango?
Where are the women, the voting women, with
94 The Naked Truth
mind and heart reaching beyond the boundary
each of her own little nest?
A hundred real women could wipe the stigma of
the public hangman off the seal of the state.
Where are the women of California!
TWO IN A MILLION
Braver than soldiers stalking to kill—
Than heroes their own lives who take or give.
True as who live when death were easier.
Rash as those splendid gamblers
Throwing dice with the unknown
For gain of knowledge.
Bold as seekers for the Pole
Or the Congo’s source—as those
Who dare the skiey whirlpools.
These play for gain that is dross
To the mother’s gain
Who pleads for the life of the boy
That slew her own.
Two in a Million 95
These play for honors, excitement,
For gold, or for peace;
But what the widow’s gain
Pleading for the life that
Killed her children’s father?
What have they braved?
The jeers of a hate-ridden world,
Contempt of the shallow and emotional
Alien to deep sympathy—
The sneers of the modern jungle
Whose denizens still proudly share
The passions and impulses
Of the wasp and the wolf.
What have they dared?
To do what the pious preach
And never practise; to be
What sages admonish all to be
And few are; not to seek revenge.
They have honored their dear dead
By love complete
That leaves no room for hate.
What is their courage?
To brave the contumely of lawyers
And judges—
The scorn of the self-righteous,
The abuse of that poverty-fear
Whose craven imbecility
Keeps the hangman’s law
On the statutes of California.
They have braved public opprobrium
And the ridicule of the smug.
From a thousand pulpits
They will be rated “sentimental.”
They have braved
The Naked Truth
The orthodox church
And the harlot press.
Their gain—if but the hope of gain
Can spur the heart and head
To act in concert—
Their gain?
Who understand alone may know.
What light is to darkness,
And love is to hate,
Such is their gain.
Daughters of the Newer Eve!
Yours the light what time
Earth's gloom shall cleave?
Temptresses with riper fruit!
Yours the lure of men bold-hearted
In the long pursuit.
Fair! ah, sisters fair!
*T is men, not brutes,
Your “sacrosanct cajoleries” ensnare.
Nor man nor Superman
Might live to grieve
His “soul's enmeshment in your hair.”
The Naked Truth 97
ONLY THE POOR
Only the poor we hang—
Never the rich!
Not all the poor we hang—
But none of the rich!
Not for murder we hang—
And only the poor!
Many slay and are free,
But not the poor!
To kill for profit,
Betray and debauch,
Are common things—
For the rich!
The hangman guards
The loot of Privilege!
We hang only the poor—
Never the rich!
98
The Naked Truth
WE LOVE MURDER
We love murder—
And hate the man.
We gloat on the crime
And loathe the man.
Our venom
We exhaust on the man—
And wallow exultant
In the shocking crime.
Our jaded appetites
Morbidly revel in the details
Of the murder–
And shrink from the man.
By press, code, gallows
We foster crime—
And hate men.
We love murder.
The Naked Truth 99
IF HE WERE YOURS
Judge, if he were your boy,
Would you hang him?
“The law” is two words—nothing more.
Those two words—of hate and revenge—
Are impotent without your interpretation.
You speak the word of death!
Governor, if he were your boy
You would not sign that death warrant.
If he were the son of your old friend,
The son of your political manager,
The son of the woman you loved—
You would not sign the death warrant.
Warden, if he were your son,
Would you hang him?
No; it is not “the law” that hangs him.
Only human beings can build a gallows,
March a boy or a man on it,
And spring the trap that hurls him Out.
100 The Naked Truth
IF WE HATED MURDER
If we hated murder—
We would cease to encourage it;
Cease to feed it on Poverty, Hate, Fear;
Cease to breed it by gruesome spectacles
And inculcate it
By the subtle force of suggestion.
If we intelligently discouraged murder—
Judges, detectives, sheriffs, keepers, lawyers
Would lose their jobs, dignities, salaries.
In every population are many,
Whose incomes depending on crime,
Are not interested to lessen murder.
If we hated murder—
And thought hanging would lessen it
We would hang even the rich. Once
We hanged a man who had $75,000–
But not until the last penny of it
Was gone for legal fees and expenses!
The Naked Truth 101
YOUR BROTHER
If he were your brother
You’d go far
And do much
To cheat the gallows!
If he were your brother,
Your neighbor, you kin,
Or your friend—
Would you cry “Hang him”?
If he were your brother,
Your son, your father,
Your husband, or lover,
You would plead for his life!
If he were your brother,
You would raise heaven
And earth to save him
From the gallows!
He is
Your brother!!
102 The Naked Truth
I WILL NOT FIGHT
I will not fight
To save for Wall street
The exclusive privilege
Of exploiting, degrading
The people of America—
For a flag, for markets, for words
Like patriotism, prosperity, or
To keep the Japanese or any other people out.
There’s room enough for the whole world of men.
I will not fight
To perpetuate slavery—
But with a mighty battle
To open the land of America
To the dispossessed millions
Count me in to the end.
War Lines
104
War Lines
ARMAGEDDON
This is no Armageddon.
This is a squabble of thieves.
The murderous hosts of Europe
Have nothing to gain or lose.
Esdraelon's plain will redden
When the masters meet the slaves.
This is no Armageddon.
That will be Death against Life
That will be Manhood’s struggle
To end the robber strife.
This is a tradesman’s war
Powder and guns and provisions
Watch how the prices soar.
This is not Armageddon.
This is the broker's gamble
With interest at 80 per cent.
A money lord’s scramble.
Hear the cash register jingle
At every soul’s descent
And the pulse of the market tingle—
This is Greed's game with Death.
This is a newspaper war—
Its pawns driven to slaughter
And lured by the daily press.
No one hates the German,
No one hates the French,
No one hates the English,
Only the daily press.
Armageddon 105
This is no Armageddon
This is the christians’ bluff
All the captain's praying
That Greed may keep its clutch
And stay the Armageddon
Delay the real war
Of Man against Money.
This is no Armageddon
This is no test of strength
This is the feeding of flesh
To death machines
That rip and tear and mangle
“The human form divine”
“Made in God’s image.”
This is for broken treaties
That will avenge broken lives.
Wait till the hosts of Darkness
Face the powers of Light
Then the world-struggle!
And may Death alone win
If Right fail for Might!
106 War Lines
WAR’S MASKS
War masks itself in glittering pomp and tinsel,
With blare of brass and pageantry of trampling
troops
Cheered by aimless women who love gold braid
And smirk on empty-pated automatons
That strut like dunghill roosters and swell
With mindless vanity vacuously to obey.
War’s mask is this, but at its heart lies
Cold, mechanical, calculating Profit.
War lures with murder, blood, and pillage,
With rape and loot and all that stirs the passing
Human brute to primitive ferocity;
Envisages with lust of gluttony
To lure the jungle avatars of men.
War’s lure is this, but at its heart lies gold
For bankers, bonds for financiers, and profit
For crafty brokers of war munitions.
War hypnotizes by sorceries of words
And fatuous phrases. Nor Patriotism, the flag,
My Country, Prosperity, Progress, nor a thousand
Like noises would Profit budge an inch
To serve—because Profit knows them for what
They are, but empty sound to awe the mass
To insane murder for Profit's profit. War
Enchants the weak with mercantile palaver.
War masks in red hot courage, in glorious
Death for fatherland and home—lies infernall
(Devised of church and press and school
To pay their keep by wealth) that snare the weak
And ignorant to hack and kill each other
War’s Masks
107
And stand as targets for machine guns
While Profit reaps fresh harvests
And validates again its titles to land.
War's public attitude is Balance of Power,
Trade Supremacy, Markets of the World,
National Integrity; its pith and purpose is
To refasten the chains of industrial
Slavery on toiling millions, to exploit
Little tradesmen and petty merchants
And hoard still vaster piles of wealth
In never loosening grip of Greed.
To break the wave of social discontent
War masks in frothy horror and black fear;
Dangles huge cruelties and crimson
Carnivals of pain to fascinate the
Sensual emotionalists and snare souls weak
Of human courage aborn of thought
And sympathy, sans manly daring
To fight for Man instead of kings and profit.
108
War Lines
WAR WILL NOT CEASE
Let warriors be reassured
Their occupation is lasting—
But men will not always
Kill each other.
There will be no peace
Till the last lie
Of religion and philosophy
Has been uncovered.
Let the fighters cease twaddle
Of the enervation of peace.
Greed will remain a worthy foe
For many centuries.
There will be no peace
Till man is free
Of all the superstitions
Of church and state.
Let the heroes be content.
There are monsters and dragons
Of unknown spheres to slay—
When man has ceased to kill himself.
There will be no peace
For courageous men
Till the last veil is torn
From the visage of Reality.
War Lines 109
THE REAL WAR
That ye strive for the real
As ye battle for the false.
That ye bleed for freedom
As ye fight for chains.
That ye dare for Man
As ye die for God.
That ye slay your foe
As ye kill your kin.
That men who think and feel
Be as bold as the shallow.
That sympathy and thought
Rob us not of manhood.
THE NEW WAR
The new war will be
For men instead of markets,
For life instead of profit,
For love instead of hate—
To dethrone rulers and gain
The earth and its fruit
For the Many!
110 War Lines
A FLAGGERAL
The fondest flag is only a rag—
But a man is a soul!
Tho it be of silk
It is poverty’s ilk
That pays its toll—
Men hack and kill
At Capital’s will
Death take and give
So a few can live
On the blood and dure
Of the poor.
It's a rich man’s flag
And only a rag-
But a human life is a soul!
The silkiest flag is only a rag—
But a man can feel !
The scrawniest cat
Or the skulkiest rat
Can breathe and suffer,
But a flag is tougher
Than the heart of Greed
Making war for profit!
They wave the flag, a gaudy rag—
They raise a shout
And the dupes march out
To murder each other
At $13 a month!
The proudest flag
Is a senseless rag—
But a man knows joy and pain!
A Flaggeral 111
A rag can’t feel,
But its wavers steal
The land of the “foreign foe,”
While the men who fight,
Give Greed its might,
Get what for their pain and woe?
Disemployed at home
Blanket-stiffs they roam—
Driven off the naked earth as bums
In the name of a flag
That's only a rag,
But is fondled more
Than human babes in the slums!
Who honor the flag
As a sacred rag
Dishonor woman and man!
Their guns to sell
Turn earth to hell
On human life they prey !
And the red bar's stain
Is the human flood
The heart’s own blood–
The brand of Cain!
O, a child’s lost joy
Or a broken toy,
Of sanctity has more
Than profit's flag of war!
112
War Lines
ALL THIS KILLING
Cowardice lurks in killing
Weakness dogs
Fear skulks
Behind it.
Logically it is futile
To kill—boyish, brutish
Not manly.
It may be unavoidable
To kill—
A mad dog or a mad king
Or a mad financier
Or a mad policeman—
But weakness and fear
Lurk in killing.
It is hideous to kill
And unnecessary.
Nor health nor strength
Nor beauty can ensue.
Weakness and fear
Are the net
Products of killing.
There are other ways
To be passionate
And courageous,
To risk life and feel
The shock and thrill
Or high daring
Than by killing people.
War Lines 113
THE LESSER EVIL
War to abolish Poverty
Is better than peace
That maintains Privilege.
PEACE AND WAR
Profit takes heavier toll
Of human life
In peace than in war—
Will drain the heart’s blood
Of more men, women, children
Starve their bodies and minds,
Vampirize their souls—
Ruthlessly and needlessly slay,
In America,
To fatten dividends
Of railroad, factory, and mine,
More, far more than will die
On the European battlefields!
114 War Lines
ITS SHAME
This war’s a wanton hussies’ bawdy game.
Usury’s murderous lust of gain—its aim
No higher than a harlot's lust of gaud.
Each power aloot—oblivious to shame!
ITS STRUT
War’s fatuous strut—its hate and rage so crass,
Gold braid, emotion, pompous death en masse—
Is all a wolfish, strident, shrewish game,
The soldier but an automatic ass.
THE LIE
The Moving Finger writes with crimson stain
Its record red of every human gain
In christendom—the theologic lie!—
That growth can only come thru pain.
War Lines 115
SLAY YOUR MASTERS
Ye are taught to hate,
Ye are drilled to kill—
One Another!
Ye are bidden:
Servants obey your masters.
But the nucleus stirs in the life cell,
The prisoned plant bursts granite
To reach the light,
The hidden God that man is
Awakes!
Above the rattle of falling chains
Hear ye the voice of Manhood—
Servants arise,
And slay your masters! .
Hear ye the boldness, the trueness,
the faith
And the thunders
Of awakened Men:
“Kill only the foeman!
Kill boldly, O yeomen,
All who would exploit,
Would rob, or deny—
Would palaver and cheat
By law and deceit
Any child of its food,
Any soul, any man or his mate
Of whatever is earned
In the sweat of the brow!”
116 War Lines
THE EUCHARIST
Again the christians gather for the Host,
The millions slay to please their Holy Ghost
And make of Eucharist a real feast
For God who smiles when murder riots most.
IF WE MUST
Since murderous war, invoked by tradesmen’s
greed,
To battle hells the landless millions speed;
If war must be the common lot—O men
Awake! and battle for the common need 1
New Songs
118 New Songs
SONG OF THE PRINTING PRESS
I am the Printing Press—Anarch of christendom,
Breeder of discontent, fomenter of strife,"destroyer
of hopes and delusions:
I am the thunder and the flash bursting palls
of sacred superstition—
The earthquake sundering anointed forms,
The wind that topples reverent customs,
The flood that drowns creeds and churches—
I am the sunlight in which men rear new temples,
Gain new illusions, fresh hopes, larger ideals.
I am the Printing Press—Dooming authority,
Unseating gods and kings, plotting revolutions,
stirring to rebellion, revealing to slaves the
chains that bind them:
I am the danger of a little knowledge that
precedes more knowledge and ripens to
wisdom:
I am the pain and the ecstacy of quickened
growth, the bitterness of knowing, the pang of
disillusion, the dregs at the bottom of the cup:
I am that which is clothing right with might.
I am the Printing Press—Time's analyst,
Sifting, dissecting, assorting, evading or hiding
nothing;
Searching the dark corners, dragging into sun-
light the dust of centuries, the slime of lust,
the mold of weakness, the debris of ignorance;
Lending myself to all shams, shames and vil-
lainies, to all graces and divinities:
The Printing Press 119
Culture and crudeness I blazon, faith and doubt
unmask, hate and love mingle, pride and
humility, prejudice and sympathy uncover—
I reveal man to himself.
I am the Printing Press—The silver thread
That binds the human whole:
I am that Messiah foretold by the prophets.
Buddha and Jesus were my heralds:
I am the resurrection and the life, the cross
and the circle, regeneration and destruction;
I am the trinity of pain, knowledge and growth;
I am the power to roll the stone from the tomb
of death and reveal life:
I shall uncover the secret place of the Grail
and cleanse all men
To drink from the golden chalice.
I am the Printing Press—The means and the end
Of external progression—the journey out and
the return.
I shall marry the heart to the head of man—
wed intellect and sympathy, care and art,
purpose and genius, passion and reason,
religion and logic, poetry and usefulness,
morality and nature:
I am wearing away the crudities and intensify-
ing the realities—transmuting the primitive
instincts to finer perceptions:
I am fitting man for his new environment:
I am the prophet of that time when the written
word shall be obsolete—
When men shall speak soul to soul.
120 New Songs
A PLEA FOR MAN
I plead for Man—
Against the Written Word:
The state and the statute,
Preamble and resolution,
Theology and philosophy,
The fixed belief and the static thought—
Reason’s fumbling clutch, logic's icy touch;
Against the sorcery of syllables and
The hypnotism of hyperbole.
Against all the tomb's tentacles
I plead for living men.
I plead for Man—
Against the guns and creeds of Greed
And the black blindness
Of orthodox and infidel
To the law as unbroken as gravity
That the only gain
From the commerce of death machines
Is hate and pain.
Against the world's darkest hour
Of the tradesman's triumph
I plead for human beings.
I plead for Man—
Against hell’s heresy
That growth and joy and wisdom
Must come thru suffering,
That good lies in the bitterness of strife
And grief is integral in life;
That sweets grow in sour and purity in filth
Or anything of worth accrue to one
By forcing misery on another.
A Plea for Man 121
I
Against the exploiter's creeds of Death and
Destruction -
I plead for human life.
plead for Man—
Against God
And all his plutocrats and prophets
And their religions to bind vassals,
Their morals to promote mediocrity,
Their dogma of Rights
To maintain “mine and thine”
Against the human need
And the heart’s demand.
Against the glory of God and the gluttony of
Greed
I plead for Man!
122 New Songs
SONG OF THE RAILWAY CROSSING
Hear the bells at the railway crossing.
Ding dong, they sound,
If the wind is right,
Above the roar of the hastening train
Of electric cars
Whirling a hundred passengers
From the city to their homes.
It's a dangerous crossing.
The smooth auto road
Bisects it diagonally.
Therefore the warning bells—
Ding dong, they sound,
When the wind is right.
A dozen people a year
Were killed here.
That’s why the bells were installed—
Cunning electric automatic bells.
Now the death record
Is reduced to six.
Hear the bells
At the dangerous crossing.
Ding dong, they sound,
Sometimes,
Loud and clear above the wind
And the rushing trains.
Glorious bells!
Six lives a year
They save—
And six are killed.
The Railway Crossing 123
Four interurban electric tracks
Cross the county road here.
The trolley cars pound along
At thirty miles an hour,
The autos glide at twenty-five.
Last night in the wind and rain
There was a crash!
Only one was killed
And one crippled.
Whose life went out?
Not yours or mine,
Anyone we know?
A. B. Smith.
Never heard of him.
Read the next item.
What are the bells saying?
Ding dong, they talk.
This is their song:
“Cheap skates are we.
We cost a hundred dollars
And save the railroad
And the county the expense
Of obviating a dangerous grade crossing.”
“Cheap bells are we,
As cheap as human life.
We save dividends for the company
And every taxpayer
Fifty cents.”
Ding dong, ring the bells
At the dangerous crossing.
One was killed
And one crippled
Last night.
New Songs
Not you or me—
Only some stranger.
Taxes are high
And life is cheap.
Ding dong, ring the bells.
Dividends are more than life
And taxes than a cripple!
When the life
Or the limb
Is not
Yours or mine.
All the dividends of the world
Were not worth my life,
Or yours.
But the other fellow’s—
Ding dong, ring the cheap bells.
New Songs 125
THAT LOVE BE BOLD
That Love should be as bold as Hate—
Audacious, fearless
For light and joy and freedom,
As Hate is for darkness and pain;
That Love should dare to seize and hold its own.
For what is all the world’s attainment
If pain with growth and knowledge
Keep the pace?
While crime and hunger stalk
What profit all the piety and grace?
That Kindness be as strong as Cruelty—
To mold the world
And have its heart’s desire;
To kill the thought or thing—
Remove whatever bar its way!
For what are all the dreams and ideals
If love be meek?
If kindness, thought, and care
Gain only—patience!
The dream is but a snare if Love be weak.
That Sympathy should outrun Prejudice
And have its way on earth!
Nor wait the toilsonne centuries’
Blind and groping growth.
That Sympathy be quick, courageous, true!
126
New Songs
A MAN BELIEF
I believe in Man—
In men, women, and children;
In their welfare,
Their freedom from exploitation,
Their opportunity to grow—
Every human being’s chance
Freely to develop
His own Individuality
Without hindrance
From Greed.
I believe in Man—
In living, breathing human beings
The “least” or the “worst”
Of which
Is more precious
Than all the minted gold,
Than any state or government,
Or any institution or church
Or property
The sun ever shone on.
I believe in Man—
Every man and every woman
And every child,
The raggedest of whom
Is more to be considered
Than all the railroads
And corporations
And temples and mansions
And riches
In the whole wide world!
A Man Belief 127
I believe in Man —
Whose Present Hour
And chance to live a full life
Now and Here
Is more than all the Gods
And theologies—
More than all the dreams
Of superman
Than all the means and methods
Of Utopia!
128 New Songs
SONG OF THE HANGMAN
I am the hangman—
Paid to strangle boys, men, women—
Whoever is caught in the snarled meshes
Of the Big Net
Threaded of the vengeful penal code,
Woven by detectives, judges, and lawyers
On the warp of Poverty.
I am the hangman—
I
Hired by the Ladies and Gentlemen
Of wealth, piety, position, and culture
To suffocate their brothers and sisters—
Because ten thousand years ago
Marauding herders imposed “the law”
On conquered peasants.
am the hangman—
Who throttles the victims of the Net
In an obscure corner of a
Gloomy room in the state prison
Where the moans and curses
Will be hushed
From the delicate ears
Of wives and mothers.
But they hear and feel me!
Ill-fed mothers embrace me;
Their unborn babes are mine
When chance calls;
In the womb I brand them.
Vain is your hiding of me—
All the fearsome and weak are mine,
Whose passions outrun their mentalities,
Song of the Hangman 129
Whose spleens are more developed
Than their brains!
For I am the lethal god—
I
I
Whose face is hidden in
Clouds of red passion. I am
The god of the abnormal.
I obsess the weak of will
And possess the perverted.
Into every open ear I whisper
“Murder!” I am
The color red that turns to black–
And while I live
No soul evades me!
am the public hangman—
Focus of the world's cruelty,
Cumulous of its hate,
Sum-total of its fear and ignorance.
My days and ways and dreams
Are of blood.
I am he who kills, kills, kills—
For a monthly wage
Paid by the State.
am the hangman—
Mercenary descendant,
Of old Judge Lynch,
Whose ways were quick, crude, merciful—
And I, more often than he did,
Hang the wrong man.
My ways are refined. I am
Cold and mechanical—the paid ghoul
With critical eye for the long tortures
Of those who wait in the Death Cell.
I am the State's hangman—
The conscience of every voter,
130 New Songs
His malice and savagery.
And I am bolder than he, for
I do what he dare not.
My blood lust is his—
My courage is my own.
I am the hangman—
The State’s hired butcher of men.
I am the avatar
From dungeons of the Inquisition,
And ye are the mob that gloated.
Long live the lust of blood!
When my trade is gone
Men will cease to kill each other.
I
am the hangman—
Who does the work the judge
Orders but has not the “sand”
To perform.
I am the sign of the incapacity
Of modern people to treat
The crime of murder intelligently.
I am the ignorance and stupidity
Of the Christian mob.
New Songs 131
THE DOCTRINE OF RIGHTS
The Doctrine of Rights—
Dogma of intolerable wrongs—
Wrongs to little children, to nursing mothers,
to youth of immaturity, to helpless age—
The food stolen from their mouths
And heaped in gluttonous piles around a few
greed-blinded inhuman beings—
Billionaires who riot in luxury while millions
drudge and pinch and go without—
Wrongs that Men, real men, courageous men
with the natural dignity of a Hottentot, the
human sympathy of an Apache, the nascent
manhood of a wolf or porcupine would never
tolerate—
Babes starving by the thousand
Children’s lives ground out in mine and mill
Women on the street corners offering their bodies
for bread—
And we haggle over Rights!
Under the dogma of Rights—
The greatest wrongs the world has ever known!
No one has a Right to anything
While a child lacks food.
It is avarice and envy
That demand their Rights.
The brave take and leave.
The Doctrine of Rights is a quibble—
A dogma of caste
Artificially dividing
An invertebrate people
Who argue and pass resolutions
132 New Songs
While their weaker ones starve
And broken human lives
Litter every pathway—
In a land of Plenty, in a land of Plenty, in a land
of Plenty!
In a land where all the necessities and luxuries :
of life
Are so abundant they choke the warehouses
And the surplus is destroyed.
The state’s Rights
The church’s Rights
The landlord’s Rights
The army's Rights
The prison keepers' Rights
The hangman's Rights
The millionaire's Rights
The exploiters’ Rights
The bankers’ Rights
The money lenders’ Rights
The brokers’ Rights
The merchants’ Rights
The employers’ Rights
The brothel keepers' Rights
The prostitutes’ Rights
The wage earners’ Rights
The people's Rights
The paupers’ Rights—
Inalienable Rights!
Up and down the christian earth men—
Are we Men?—
Prescribing, discovering, balancing, maintaining,
defining, defending, enacting
Our Rights!
Bench and bar ransack tombs and tomes
For definitions and precedents
The Doctrine of Rights 133
To establish Rights!
While a million shop girls sell their bodies for
ribbons and bread—
(Ribbons count more
Than bread
With the woman
I would love)—
And bread and ribbons so plenty
That the markets are glutted—
While men—
Men?
Haggle over their Rights!
Prisons, gallows, penal codes, death machines—
Ten hundred thousand
Toiling, slaving, sweating
Night and day—dying!—
In the munition hells
To make fiendish contrivances by which living
beings are mutilated and murdered—
To establish and maintain Rights!
Whose Rights?—
Of the cunning, the stronger, the cruel, the
heartless;
To rob, cheat, kill, debauch, and exploit
The weaker and the trusting.
All up and down
The christianized parts of earth
Spies and detectives
Are peeping thru keyholes
Of cabinets and bedchambers
To uphold Rights!
And children are dying in the streets
And men are entombed in mines
Youth poisoned and life blackened
134 New Songs
In sweatshops—
While we haggle over Rights!
The Doctrine of Rights
Is hell’s dogma of servant and master.
Manhood will cast it out
And put decency, courage, kindness—Love!
A bold defiant daring love
In its place.
O have done with the quibbling!
The world needs Men—
The starving children need Men
To feed them
Now!
Personal Privilege
136
Personal Privilege
PERSONAL PRIVILEGE
I will love all men
I will hate no man
But I will toady
To no man's
Superstitions—
To no man’s concept
Of an alien God
Outside, over, beyond
Himself
And myself—
Of a God
Who does not speak
In every human voice
And look thru
Every human eye.
I will honor all men
I will judge no man
But I will not
Keep silence
At the things men do.
I will oppose
I will denounce
The deceits
And the cruelties
Of any man.
I will love all men
But not their crimes.
I will accept all men
Without question
But not their delusions.
Personal Privilege 137
Some men do this
Some that.
Whether this or that
I am little interested
Unless it hinders me
Or others.
. Another's motive
I cannot penetrate.
My own are mixed
And obscured
By innumerable things
That urge and limit.
I will accuse no soul
But I will appraise
All conduct that trenches
On the welfare of another.
I will separate
The doer from the deed.
I am anxious to please
My friends.
I am solicitous
For the goodwill
Of those who love Men—
But I will not
Bow to their idols.
138
Personal Privilege
A FRIEND OF MINE
wº. F. G.
He sells goods,
Is a merchant of wares—
Yet I love him.
He sells things that people need,
Yet I respect him!
He doesn’t paint pictures
Or write poems
Or deal in “culture”
While children starve
And girls go to the streets.
He only sells goods
That people need
And sells 'em honestly
And has never yet
Sold himself.
What artist, lawyer
Poet, writer
Can say as much for himself
Truthfully—that he has
Never sold himself for Gain?
That he has never
Lowered his ideal
For dollars?
A few—possibly—possibly!
Be truthful to yourself.
He sells goods—
But not himself.
Personal Privilege 139
DIVERGENCE
Does life
Present itself to you
As a personal equation—
A matter of getting
Some personal material
Advantage
Regardless
Of broken lives
And starving children?
Then I am not
With you. Our
Paths widely diverge.
140
Personal Privilege
FAY
Can a picture
Be better than it looks?
Yes, if a human portrait.
There’s Fay—
As bad as any of us
And as good—
But looking,
Staid, dignified, prominent!
No one could be
So eminently
Distinguished and correct
As he—looks—
Fay—
With the heart of an anarchist
The soul of an I.W.W.
The brand of the outlaw
Christ!
A traitor to his
Smug and respectable
Appearance.
Why!
He gives comfort and cash
To law breakers,
Associates with agitators—
He, who looks
Like a Pillar of Society
Friendly with
Convicted felons—
Fay 141
And with some of us
Not convicted—yet.
Even with the disturbers
Of Existing Conditions
The eminently
Respectable
Dignified—Fay—
A traitor to his Class A.
He is fey
To the world of things
As they are
And Fay
To us who know him.
142
Personal Privilege
WHY I STAY
There’s a soft green island
In the South Sea
And a dark-eyed woman
Who beckons to me.
Yet I stay.
There's a hungry child
In California
An infant soul
Whose body
Lacks food and shelter.
There's a starving maid
In California,
A girl whose hunger
For bread or ribbons
Is denied.
There's an exploited mother
In California
Whose choice is
Between the sweat shop,
Starvation or harlotry.
There’s a jobless man
In California
Tramping over Idle Acres
Moving on—begging—stealing—
The sheriff’s irons behind him.
There’s a broken life
In California
A discouraged hopeless being
A blood brother of mine—
And a fighting chance
Why I Stay 143
To succor him—
A bare chance
Immediately
To Open the Earth
And free him.
Not one only
Tho one were enough
For a man—
But a hundred thousand—
So I stay and strive in California.
There's a green isle near Fiji
In the tropical sea
And a dark-eyed woman
Beckons to me,
Yet I stay in California.
144
Personal Privilege
NOW
This is the age of romance
Not yesterday
Nor tomorrow.
This is the day
For great daring
And wonderful deeds.
This is the hour
To slay the dragon
Of Greed.
This is the time
Of high emprise
We are the world’s heroes.
This is the age of romance
When Manhood shall
Assault Omnipotence!
Personal Privilege 145
AT THE ROSSLYN HOTEL
One arose and said
He had sacrificed more
For Single Tax than I had.
He was right.
I haven’t sacrificed anything
For Single Tax.
The vision of Henry George
Owes me nothing.
I am its debtor
For the greatest hours of my life.
Facets of Truth
148 Facets of Truth
THE SILVER THREAD
There are in every society a number of people
who care.
For these life is not bounded by their material
satisfactions. They are not content to mind their
own business and let the word wag along as it
will. For it doesn’t wag that way. It has no
will. It wags as Rockefeller and the steel trust
will. And that spells a shameful and unnecessary
poverty—hunger, prostitution, starvation wages,
child slavery, insanity, suicide, murder for profit,
and millions disemployed.
Reason enough why those who care should not
be content to sit with hands folded in their own
houses.
Consciously or unconsciously these sense the
invisible silver thread that runs from heart to
heart and binds the human mass into a unity from
which no unit can escape.
This silver thread is not known or sensed by
those whose attention is fixed on externalities,
and they marvel when “unmerited” blows fall;
nevertheless it is the most real thing in the world,
and whoever does not reckon with it will find his
steering wrong.
The silver thread by which the tortures of a
Danbury hatter touch the life of a Pasadena mil-
lionaire is not mere trope of speech or poetic
metaphor. It is more real and lasting and unes-
capable than rent, interest, and land values.
But only those who care sense it.
Facets of Truth 149
HUMAN NATURE PERCENTAGES
Gather a thousand human beings anywhere.
Show them the possibility of realizing immedi-
ately, a sane, decent, kindly system of social
life
Eighty per cent will enlist to accomplish it.
Gather a thousand human beings anywhere.
Show them a strange new fiscal device for the
alleviation of poverty an inch a year.
Ten per cent will eagerly embrace it and try
to force it on the rest.
Gather a thousand human beings anywhere.
Show them an Ideal that calls for heroism—
and a Self Interest easily reached.
Ninety per cent of them will choose the ideal.
150 Facets of Truth
STILL WAITING FOR HEAVEN
Beware the medieval concept of Heaven! It
lingers in the consciousness of those who think
themselves most liberal, most radical, unortho-
dox, infidel. Many who fancy themselves free
bold atheists still believe in Heaven.
They have disowned the word, denied the ma-
terial mansions in the skies, repudiated an after-
death state of perfect bliss—still they are thrall
to the essentiality of the material concept of
Heaven, which denies the reality of Here and
Now and relegates everything to the future.
Heaven is a habit of thought, a habit of dwell-
ing only or mainly in the future. It is the idea
that happiness can only be attained after awhile,
that the ideal is only possible for the future;
that here and now we must suffer in this vale of
tears, but after awhile we will reach socialism,
or anarchism, or singletax—then our children or
their children will inhabit a decent world and
begin truly to develop.
It admirably pleases the needs of our masters
and exploiters, who are no longer alarmed that
we repudiate the word “heaven.” They grant us
that “freedom,” seeing that the Heaven habit of
thought abides with us and we go on as ever
planning and educating always, always for the
future—never for Now!
Facets of Truth 151
HUMAN NATURE
Human nature is full of meanness and pettiness
—on its surface. The tongue lies, our interests
lead us to deceit, fear keeps us chained to the
superficial, the strife against poverty engenders
hate and envy—the shadow or the reality of need
or hunger saps our frankness and courage, re-
duces us all to the status of sneak thieves and
detectives.
This is the surface of life.
Underneath it lies the heart, dormant usually,
or pumping only in a mechanical way. Rouse it,
interest it, excite it to consciousness and domin-
ance, and you will find beneath every hypocrite,
liar, and coward (which we all are)—
A Man or a Woman true and dependable at the
Center.
Human nature is cramped, distorted, perverted
—first and chiefly by the economic and industrial
infamies—but its Heart is true.
152 Facets of Truth
THE SOURCE OF POWER
The seat of power is the Heart.
The head invokes it, the hands execute it—but
power resides in the Heart.
Mentality guides, shapes, molds it (more or
less)—but the source of power is the heart.
This is not gush or sentimentality, but physi-
ologic fact.
The heart supplies all motor power—automatic-
ally as a rule, unconsciously, aimlessly.
The brain analyzes, relates, ponders, plans—
but without the Heart it has not power to stir
a leaf.
In all life the Heart is the reservoir of power,
and whoever would accomplish anything must
invoke it.
We quicken the nerve ganglia of the spleen,
the liver, the solar plexus, and other centers—
and get emotions of hate, envy, deceit, sensuality,
as these centers draw undue blood from the Heart.
But quicken the Heart of man, reach directly
the Source of Power, and a great expansion of
force flows (we call it love or sympathy) that
dominates, dares, and performs!
Facets of Truth 153
PERSONAL SALVATION
Personal Salvation is the great delusion. The
world is not built that way. Individualism is
only intellectual and at no time is it more than
half the truth. The other half is, that the deeper
part of every human is indissolubly attached to
the human mass and responsive to every throb
of pain or joy that thrills the mass. No one can
fall off the earth or rise above it. While the mass
is enslaved no one is free. While the mass is
degraded no one can be much else.
IDEALS
The only man who lives up to his ideals is the
man who has none.
Ideals are of thought which is fluidic, and
wherever thought is active, ideals keep a measur-
able pace in advance of conduct. When conduct
catches up with ideals, thought has ceased to flow,
“mental stability” ensues, self-complacency and
self-righteousness obtain.
154 Facets of Truth
MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE
Self-sacrifice and martyrdom are childish con-
cepts—when not worse.
Men seek ever their own good—what is most
congenial to themselves, to whatever element of
self is then uppermost.
Martyrdom and self-sacrifice are—cant.
No one sacrifices himself—he “sacrifices” one
part of himself to another part. He relinquishes,
rejects, that which he conceives to be the lesser
in order to obtain what appears to him to be the
greater—having learned that he cannot have both.
Our acts are for self, for the gain of self, be the
gain of gold, pride, love personal or impersonal.
Forever we search for the more desirable—to
Us—for the thrills, surges, feelings, exaltations
(or degradations) peculiar to ourselves.
How blindly we grope!—for the excitations of
alcohol, the soothings of peace, or the ecstacies of
the heretic burned at the stake!
I want that, and only that, which it will give
me the greatest satisfaction to obtain.
What is gain for one man appears as dross to
another.
Fear, prejudice, habit, keep many from finding
their best gain. Ignorance keeps all from their
best. But that which each seeks is ever the best
that each knows and feels at the time.
Some find their best in seizing, robbing, ex-
ploiting — or in ease and yielding. Some find
theirs in giving and in doing. But each seeks
always his own best, and martyrdom and self-
sacrifice are—cant.
Facets of Truth 155
OODLES OF KNOWLEDGE
If socialism, anarchism, or singletax means a
kinder and decenter world—
We are ready for it Now!
All our economic education pertains only to
life in the christian jungle—and doesn’t ease it or
help it. If singletax, socialism, or anarchism
means to perpetuate this jungle existence, then
they are all negligible.
If they mean the end of robbery and exploita-
tion, if any one of them will shear the state of its
power to bestow privileges that despoil—
Then we are ready for it Now, without another
moment’s education or preparation.
All that lacks is the Power.
“Knowledge is power”—not at all. Intellect is
only the perceiver of things, the knower, the direc-
tor. Power is one thing, quite another is know-
ledge.
Already we have knowledge—mountains of it,
books, tomes, libraries of ancient and modern
knowledge. Life is cluttered with knowledge—
the heart is cloyed with it—we have shrivelled to
pusillanimity beneath the heavy load of our
knowledge—most of which is self-contradictory
and all of it negligible while a million human
beings are jobless!
Knowledge has robbed us of Power.
156 Facets of Truth
THE LINE OF CLEAVAGE
Those who Care and those who don't—this is
the line of cleavage in human society. It does not
run between exploiter and exploited, the robber
and the robbed: those are later accidents of en-
vironment and opportunity and circumstances.
The still earlier “accident”—so it must appear to
our comprehension—that we have to deal with is
the “accident” of birth which gave this man a
quickened heart and this man a dull one—this
man a heart responsive and this man a heart
obtuse.
Some men Care and some men don’t—this is
the line of cleavage. It does not parallel any of
the artificial lines that superficially separate so-
ciety into classes. It is not between the masses
and the classes, not between labor and capital
nor between worker and parasite; it is not between
proletariat, bourgeois, and tinsel aristocrat, nor
between the educated and the ignorant.
The true line of cleavage runs perpendicular
thru all the classes—even thru radicalism itself—
and divides the world into those who Care and
those who don’t.
Facets of Truth 157
NOT THE WORST THING
War is not the worst thing in the world.
It is not so evil and hideous a thing as the
gallows or the electric chair.
The war passion is fine—that men will leave all
that is dear to them to go off and face death for
an ideal, however mistaken. Slavish peace is
worse than war, and infinitely worse are the de-
gradation's of disemployment.
War at worst is ignorance—that men should
make an ideal of their slaveries.
The sorrow of the war is, not the spirit of
idealism that drives the millions to it, but that
the millions should mistake their chains for
“something better” and make an ideal of their
slaveries.
The shame of the war is—the Profit wrung
from it. g
158 Facets of Truth
THE HEART LEADS
The heart leads, not the head. Reason is to
sift truth from its clinging fancies and crass ma-
terial concepts, mind is to detect error, to corre-
late and to explain, but the finding of truth and
peace or whatever is of real worth is the function
of the heart. It leads! And it leads not to de-
spair, not to distrust of Infinity or carping at its
seeming cruelties, but to a wider sphere of con-
sciousness with profounder depths of feeling and
loftier intellectual reaches, where the antinomies
and perplexities of external life are softened
gradually till they disappear—where the sharp
blacks and whites merge into grayness and the
garish midday colors are lost in azure mists thru
which rise those “half-glimpsed battlements of
eternity”—
“Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.”
Facets of Truth 159
THE WORLD IS AWAKE
The world is awake as never before.
Its heart is aflame with daring.
Mankind is ready for wonderful changes.
It is the time for the fruition of dreams!
Huge things are going on—
Robberies and exploitations that stagger the
imagination,
A world holocaust of senseless murder,
Half of human energy making death machines,
Privilege reaping monstrous streams of wealth
That flow from the life blood of countless
children, women, and men—
Human life crushed into Profit!
The world is awake—Only for blood, lust, and
death?
Wait! You will see. Great things are coming—
Quickly!
The heart of the world is aflame.
It is the hour for the fruition of dreams!