Page:Slabs of the sunburnt West.djvu/19

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The Windy City
5
It is easy to sit listening to a boy babbling
 of the Pottawattamie moccasins in Illinois,
 how now the roofs and smokestacks cover miles
 where the deerfoot left its writing
 and the foxpaw put its initials
 in the snow … for the early moccasins … to read.

It is easy for the respectable taxpayers to sit in the
 street cars and read the papers, faces of burglars,
 the prison escapes, the hunger strikes, the cost of
 living, the price of dying, the shop gate battles of
 strikers and strikebreakers, the strikers killing
 scabs and the police killing strikers—the strongest,
 the strongest, always the strongest.

It is easy to listen to the haberdasher customers hand
 each other their easy chatter—it is easy to die
 alive—to register a living thumbprint and be dead
 from the neck up.
And there are sidewalks polished with the footfalls of
 undertakers' stiffs, greased mannikins, wearing up-to-the-minute
 sox, lifting heels across doorsills,
 shoving their faces ahead of them—dead from the
 neck up—proud of their sox—their sox are the last
 word—dead from the neck up—it is easy.

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