I was falling, but I was stopped right in my tracks.
Guess it's better than falling and not being able to go back.

There are galaxies of stars in your eyes
Like the rust spots scattered on the slide.
The one we used to ride,
Before the moon stole the tide.
And now I’m lost in the broken scatters
Because you were all that mattered.

Blue like the diamonds in their eyes.
A childhood broken on a rusted slide.
The rungs of the ladder are gone,
The sirens of the city moving on.

My bedsheets are soaked in memories and emotions
A stain of blood there, some drips of tears there,
A warm imprint of people who once held each other there
I put them in the wash, but they don't seem to come out

What if we stopped seeing people as a gender, race, or religion
And started seeing them as actual human souls instead?

If we were all pieces of cloth
And our ****** purity was represented
Some peoples would be stained,
Others maybe even torn,
But my cloth would be pretty clean
And that's okay too

I AM a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
I hate and **** better men than I am, so do you, so do all of us-maybe-maybe so.
In the ends of my fingers the itch for another man's neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusk's cartoons against the sunset.
This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mother's milk, this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlums-maybe so.
Let us go on, brother hoodlums, let us **** and ****, it has always been so, it will always be so, there is nothing more to it.
Let us go on, sister hoodlums, ****, ****, and ****, the torsoes of the world's mother's are tireless and the ***** of the world's fathers are strong-so go on-****, ****, ****.
Lay them deep in the dirt, the stiffs we fixed, the cadavers bumped off, lay them deep and let the night winds of winter blizzards howl their burial service.
The night winds and the winter, the great white sheets of northern blizzards, who can sing better for the lost hoodlums the old requiem, "**** him! **** him!..."
Today my son, to-morrow yours, the day after your next door neighbor's-it is all in the wrists of the gods who shoot craps-it is anybody's guess whose eyes shut next.
Being a hoodlum now, you and I, being all of us a world of hoodlums, let us take up the cry when the mob sluffs by on a thousand shoe soles, let us too yammer, "**** him! **** him!..."
Let us do this now ... for our mothers ... for our sisters and wives ... let us ****, ****, ****-for the torsoes of the women are tireless and the ***** of the men are strong.Chicago, July 29, 1919.