Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Vol. 2, No. 23, August, 1921 / America's Magazine of Wit, Humor and Filosophy

Smokehouse Poetry

In the September issue Smokehouse Poetry will feature The Unwritten Law by Budd McKillips, author of After the Raid, which scored such a recent success in the Whiz Bang, and Angela Morgan’s poem, Betrayed.

Bad, hopelessly bad!

I yielded to love that sways mankind,

Not the mere measure of bodily pleasure,

But love that wakes in the soul and mind,

Born of the spirit at God’s behest;

And I bartered all I had,

I, with the warmth of a child at my breast—

Am bad, hopelessly bad!

That is the start of Miss Morgan’s plea for the woman who falls and brings to memory the biblical words, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” There will be several other red-blooded gems in the smokehouse poetry section next month.

* * *

The Far East

By the mud hole down in Subic,

Looking lazy at the bay,

There’s a goo-goo dame awaiting,

And I think I hear her say,

“Come you back, you malo soldier

Come you back, from o’er the sea,

Come you back and pay your jaw-bone

Por-a-que you jaw-bone me.”

Her little skirt was baggy,

Only reaches to her knees,

Her hair is black and greasy

And it is full of bugs and fleas,

Her teeth are black with betel nut,

Or colored with dark red paint,

Her name is Donna Marie,

The same as her patron saint.

When the rain fills up the rice fields,

And soaks us exiles to the skin

We all go down to “Bino Mary’s”

And tank up on square faced gin,

With her arms around my shoulders,

And her cheeks to mine pressed close,

And I smell her breath, Oh! Glory,

I have to hold my nose.

But I’ve left it all behind me,

Thank God, I’m far away,

Back here in God’s own country,

And you bet your boots, I’ll stay,

And I’m learning in my old home town

That folks are wise who say,

When you hear that “Far East” calling

Just be wise and stay away.

No more have I of the “Dhoby”

Or the awful prickly heat,

But I walk out in the evening,

With a maiden fair and sweet.

Just give me one good Yankee girl,

Looking like my own,

And the goo-goo girls are welcome,

To the “gink” that wrote this poem.

* * *

Woman

Oh, woman, woman, woman;

You are something more than human!

Ever changing, ever charming

And sometimes quite alarming.

And though you break our banks,

We can only speak our thanks;

With forms so fair and hearts so true

We live and die for you, for you!

* * *

Frankie and Johnnie Blues

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following stanzas are part of the song: “Frankie and Johnnie Blues.” The poem is too long to be published in the regular issue of the Whiz Bang, but it will be reproduced IN FULL in the Winter Annual of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Pedigreed Follies of 1921-1922.

Frankie went down to the corner,

To buy herself some near beer,

Says to the handsome bartender,

Has my loving man been here?

He is my man

But he is doing me wrong.

I ain’t going to tell you no story,

Ain’t going to tell you no lies,

Johnnie left here an hour ago

With a party called Nellie Bly,

He is your husband,

But he is doing you wrong.

Frankie went back to the Bly house,

Didn’t go back there for fun,

Underneath her red kimona,

She carried a 44 gun.

She’s after the man

That was doing her wrong.

Frankie knocked on the door,

Frankie pushed on the bell,

Open that door you “crooked girl”

Or I’ll blow you clear to—well,

You’ve got my man,

That’s doing me wrong.

Thirteen girls dressed in mourning,

Thirteen men dressed in black,

They all went out to the cemetery,

But only twelve of the men came back,

They left her man,

That had done her wrong.

* * *

There was a young lady of Skye,

With a shape like a capital I.

She said “It’s too bad!

But then I can pad”—

Which shows you figures can lie.

* * *

The Lure of the Tropics

You’ve decided to come to the tropics,

Heard all that you had to do

Was sit in the shade of a cocoanut glade

While dollars rolled in to you.

You got that stuff down at the bureau;

You’ve got your statistics straight?

Well, hear what it did to another kid

Before you decide your fate.

You don’t go down with a sharp hard fall,

You just sort of shuffle along

And lighten your load of the moral code

Till you don’t know right from the wrong.

I started in to be honest,

With everything on the square,

But a man can’t fool with the golden rule

In a crowd that wont play fair.

’Twas a case of riding a crooked race,

Or being an “also ran”;

My only hope was to sneak and dope

The horse of the other man.

I pulled a deal in Guayaquil,

In an Inca silver mine;

And before they found ’twas salted ground,

I was safe in the Argentine.

Where I made short weight on the River Platte;

I was running a freighter there.

And I cracked a crib on a rich estate,

Without even turning a hair.

But the thing that’ll double bar my soul,

When it flaps at heaven’s doors,

Was peddling booze to the Santa Cruz

And Winchester forty-fours.

Made unafraid by my hellish aid,

The drink crazed brutes came down

And left a blazing, quivering mass

Of a flourishing border town.

I then took charge of a smuggler’s barge,

Down the coast from Yucatan!

But she went to hell off Cristobal

One night in a hurricane.

I got to shore on a broken oar,

In the filthy shrieking dark,

While the other two of the good ship’s crew

Were converted into shark.

From a sunbaked cliff, I flagged a skiff,

With a salt soaked pair of jeans,

Then worked my way for I couldn’t pay

On a fruiter to New Orleans.

It’s kind of a habit, the tropics—

It gets you worse than rum;

You get away and you swear you’ll stay,

But they call and back you come.

Six short months went by before

I was back there on the job

Running a war in Salvador.

With a barefoot black face mob.

A mob that made me general,

Leading a “grand” revolt,

And my only friend from start to end

Was a punishing army colt.

I might have become their president,

A prosperous man of means,

But a gunboat came and spoiled my game

With a hundred and ten marines.

So I awoke from my dream dead broke,

And drifted from bad to worse,

And sank as low as a man can go,

Who walks with an empty purse.

But stars they say appear by day

When you are down in the deep dark pit;

My lucky star found me that way

When I was about to quit.

Alone on a hot flea ridden cot,

I was down with the yellow jack

Alone in the bush and dammed near dead—

She found me and brought me back.

In her eyes shone lights of empires gone,

For her’s was the blood of kings—

When she spoke her voice inspired high thoughts,

And dreams of nobler things.

We were spliced in a Yankee meeting house

In the land of your Uncle Sam,

And I drew my pay from the U. S. A.

For I worked on the Gatun dam.

Then the devil sent his right hand man,

I might have suspected he would,

And he took her life with a long, thin knife;

Because—she was pure and good.

Within me died hope, honor, pride.

And all but a primitive will

To hound him down on his blood red trail

And find, and kill and kill!

O’er chicle camps and logwood swamps,

I hunted him many a moon

Then found my man in a long pit pan,

At the edge of a blue lagoon.

The chase was o’er at the farther shore,

It ended a two years quest

And I left him there with an empty stare

And a knife stuck in his chest.

You see those marks upon my arm?

You wonder what they mean?

Those marks were left by fingers deft

Of my trained nurse, Miss Morphine.

You say that habit’s worse than rum.

It’s possible too you are right.

But at least it drives away the things

That come and stare at night.

There’s a homestead down in an old Maine town

And the lilacs ’round the gate,

And the night winds whisper it might have been

But the truth has come too late.

For whenever you play, whatever the way,

For stakes that are large or small,

The claw of the tropics gathers it in,

And the dealer gets it all.

* * *

Oh, Happy Existence

The tom cat walketh on the fence

And calleth to his mate;

Oh, would that he would hie him hence

When he has got a date.

He cometh when my eyelids close,

To keep his moonlit tryst,

And rouses me from my sweet repose,

To pray that he’ll desist

’Tis true the tom cat grieves me sore

When he doth prowl around;

But would that I, like he, got more

Of those long evenings out.

* * *

Beware, Girls

Lovers are the most devoted where they least expect to wed.

All they seek is cruel conquest, and when hearts are made to yield,

They forsake the broken fortress and besiege another field.

They are like the crafty serpent coiled beneath the fairest flower,

Till the butterfly or the hum-bird falls within its deadly power.

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