“I’m a going to live anyhow until I die.”

                                               - Modern Ragtime Song

Over an order of planked whitefish at a downtown club,

Horace Wild, the demon driver who hurled the first aeroplane

            that ever crossed the air over Chicago,

Told Charley Cutler, the famous rassler who never touches

            booze,

And Carl Sandburg, the distinguished poet now out of jail,

He saw near Ypres a Canadian soldier fastened on a barn

            door with bayonets pinning the hands and feet

And the arms and ankles arranged like Jesus at Golgotha

            2,000 years before

Only in northern France he saw

The genital organ of the victim amputated and placed

            between the lips of the dead man’s mouth,

And Horace Wild, eating whitefish, looked us straight in the

            eyes,

And piled up circumstantial detail of what he saw one night

            running a truck pulling ambulances out of the mud

            near Ypres in November, 1915:

A box car next to a field hospital operating room … filled

            with sawed-off arms and legs . . .

Faces in the gray and the dark on the mud flats, white faces

            gibbering and loose convulsive arms making useless

            gestures,

And Horace Wild, the demon driver who loves fighting and

            can whip his weight in wildcats,

Pointed at a blue button in the lapel of his coat, “P-e-a-c-e”

            Spelled in white letters, and he blurted:

“I don’t care who the hell calls me a pacifist. I don’t care

            who the hell calls me yellow. I say war is the game of a

            lot of God-damned fools.”