Poems ✍️

ELSIE FLIMMERWON, you got a job now with a jazz outfit in vaudeville.
The houses go wild when you finish the act shimmying a fast shimmy to The
Livery Stable Blues.
It is long ago, Elsie Flimmerwon, I saw your mother over a washtub in a grape
arbor when your father came with the locomotor ataxia shuffle.
It is long ago, Elsie, and now they spell your name with an electric sign.
Then you were a little thing in checked gingham and your mother wiped your
nose and said: You little fool, keep off the streets.
Now you are a big girl at last and streetfuls of people read your name and a line
of people shaped like a letter S stand at the box office hoping to see you
shimmy.