V.D. City

You’ve seen your brite visions of glory
Where love built your city on high;
I have just seen the cold lower dungeons
Where the victims of syph roll and cry;
They are called to this city of sorrow
To confess all the wrong things they’ve done;
Their teardrops and weeping runs louder
Than my city blown down by the bombs.

There’s a street named for every disease here;
Syph alley, and clap avenue
The whores and their pimps and their victims
Crawl past on the curb to my view;
Once young and once healthy and happy;
Now a whirlpool of raving insane;
Lost here in this wild V.D. city
Where nobody knows you by name.

Your eye is too testered to see here;
Worse than lepers your skin runs with sores;
Every window stands full of lost faces;
Human wrecks pile the steps and the doors;
Must you pay your way to this city
With an hour of passions desire?
I pray that I’ll not see your face here
Where the millions now burn in the fires.