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Yodels of Good Sneer to the Pipple, Damn Them

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Yodels of Good Sneer to the Pipple, Damn Them (1928)
by Robert Ervin Howard

From a letter to TCS, ca. November 1928 (“Salaam: / I’ll swear you’re the only galoot ...”) Parody of “We Are the Music-Makers” by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy.

1888772Yodels of Good Sneer to the Pipple, Damn Them1928Robert Ervin Howard

Yodels of Good Sneer to the Pipple, Damn Them

We are the buttock shakers
  And we are the slayers of dreams,
Dredging our lone sea breakers,
  Damming up beautiful streams.
Bad losers and friend forsakers
  In whom the jackal screams,
But we are the grabbers and takers
  Of the world forever it seems

With rotten, bastardly ditties
We tore up the world’s great cities.
And over the ashes of glory
Erected a tenement whorey.

One man with a godamned hammer
   Can batter a statue down
And four with an apeish clamor
   Can tear off a virgin’s gown.

We, with our sneers and lying,
  Since the day when the dawns were young,
Built Gomorrah with our spying
  And Sodom we reared and sung.
And we curse all the birds for flying,
  And the sod whence the flowers sprung,
As we go selling and buying,
  Building a world of dung.

This work is from the United States and in the public domain because it was not legally published with the permission of the copyright holder before January 1, 2003 and the author died 88 years ago. This is a posthumous work and its copyright in certain countries and areas may depend on years since posthumous publication, rather than years since the author's death. Translations or editions published later may be copyrighted.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1936, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 87 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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