All day long when the shells sail over I stand at the sandbags and take my chance; But at night, at night I'm a reckless rover, And over the parapet gleams Romance....
O Teddy Bear! with your head awry And your comical twisted smile, You rub your eyes - do you wonder why You've slept such a long, long while? As you lay so still in the cupboard dim,...
"Sow your wild oats in your youth," so we're always told; But I say with deeper sooth: "Sow them when you're old." I'll be wise till I'm about seventy or so: Then, by Gad! I'll blossom out as an ancient beau....
He's yonder, on the terrace of the Cafe de la Paix, The little wizened Spanish man, I see him every day. He's sitting with his Pernod on his customary chair; He's staring at the passers with his customary stare....
What are you doing here, Tom Thorne, on the white top-knot o' the world, Where the wind has the cut of a naked knife and the stars are rapier keen? Hugging a smudgy willow fire, deep in a lynx robe curled,...
Her little head just topped the window-sill; She even mounted on a stool, maybe; She pressed against the pane, as children will, And watched us playing, oh so wistfully!...
When Chewed-ear Jenkins got hitched up to Guinneyveer McGee, His flowin' locks, ye recollect, wuz frivolous an' free; But in old Hymen's jack-pot, it's a most amazin' thing,...
I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie, Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die - Whether he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon;...
He was an old prospector with a vision bleared and dim. He asked me for a grubstake, and the same I gave to him. He hinted of a hidden trove, and when I made so bold...
Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank That's staked out nigh three hundred claims, and every one a blank; That's followed every fool stampede, and seen the rise and fall...
You want me to tell you a story, a yarn of the firin' line, Of our thin red kharki 'eroes, out there where the bullets whine; Out there where the bombs are bustin', and the cannons like 'ell-doors slam -...
There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame, When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name; Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came. ...
'Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare, Tellus, the smith, had taken to wife a maiden amazingly fair; Tellus, the brawny worker in iron, hairy and heavy of hand,...
One of the Down and Out - that's me. Stare at me well, ay, stare! Stare and shrink - say! you wouldn't think that I was a millionaire. Look at my face, it's crimped and gouged - one of them death-mask things;...
Humping it here in the dug-out, Sucking me black dudeen, I'd like to say in a general way, There's nothing like Nickyteen; There's nothing like Nickyteen, me boys, Be it pipes or snipes or cigars;...
What was the blackest sight to me Of all that campaign? A naked woman tied to a tree With jagged holes where her breasts should be, Rotting there in the rain.