Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine"

The staging of clerks in green visors
bent in sweatshops, penning columns
from high stools set at slanted tables
brings to mind — but I was going to say
the streets were as full of ragamuffins
as of top hats and walking sticks — and I
was intending to wedge into the time line
these lower case lives of eyestrain,
bad water and coal-fired air, even if
one can still picture the love stories
squeezed between the weary workdays —
and I was meant to remember our poor
fathers' past that they so wished forgotten —
but one will be bereft of art if one cannot
enter the great cathedrals without standing
on the backs of those who lifted the stones —
so I see now that I was fated to be a simple
interruption in the evolution of mankind
from survival of the fittest to lives of necessity,
and an art so artistic it can make one think
of nothing else — which is the core beauty
of the inner life, without which even Mozart
would have starved to death on applause.

Copyright © 2009 Marvin Bell All rights reserved
from Hubbub
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission