From “Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum”

Wallace Irwin (1875–1959)

Prologue

WOULDN’T it jar you, wouldn’t it make you sore

To see the poet, when the goods play out,

Crawl off of poor old Pegasus and tout

His skate to two-step sonnets off galore?

Then, when the plug, a dead one, can no more

Shake rag-time than a biscuit, right about

The poem-butcher turns with gleeful shout

And sends a batch of sonnets to the store.

The sonnet is a very easy mark,

A James P. Dandy as a carry-all

For brain-fag wrecks who want to keep it dark

Just why their crop of thinks is running small.

On the low down, dear Mame, my looty loo,

That ’s why I ’ve cooked this batch of rhymes for you.

Epilogue

To just one girl I ’ve turned my sad bazoo,

Stringing my pipe-dream off as it occurred,

And as I ’ve tipped the straight talk every word,

If you don’t like it you know what to do.

Perhaps you think I ’ve handed out to you

An idle jest, a touch-me-not, absurd

As any sky-blue-pink canary bird,

Billed for a record season at the Zoo.

If that ’s your guess you ’ll have to guess again,

For thus I fizzled in a burst of glory,

And this rhythmatic side-show doth contain

The sum and substance of my hard-luck story,

Showing how Vanity is still on deck

And Humble Virtue gets it in the neck.