Don't play with the grubby kids
Go uptown
Do it like your brothers!
So spoke the mother, spoke the father, taught the pastor
But he kept sneaking through the garden gate
And into the rabbit hutches
Where they played Sixty-six
For tobacco and rat pelts
Peeking under girls' skirts
Where, on old wooden crates
Cats dozed in the sun
Where, when the rain was rushing
They listened to Engelbert, the dimwit
Who bit on a hair comb
And blew Pied-Piper songs
In the evening, at the family table, after the prayer before the meal
Again you smell like a rabbit hutch
Don't play with the grubby kids
Go uptown
They pushed him into a school uptown
Combed his hair and smoothed his tangled speech
He learned to bend his body and words
And instead of Pied-Piper tunes
He had to violin the Largo
And, for skinny auntie crones
Under red rat lashes
Tinkle Kinderszenen by heart
And, cramped in rows of four
Bones brittle and more brittle, scream
Lined up between flags, bawling
That friendship is kept
Sometimes he slipped off at night to the rabbit hutch
Then the grubby kids crouched there
Don't play with the grubby kids
Go uptown
Do it like your brothers!
Out of revenge he got rich uptown
He built himself a house there, took a bath every day
Smelled like better folks smell
Laughed fat when all the rats
Timidly scurried into the sewers
Because they'd smelled him
And he tore down rabbit hutches
Down. In their place he had
Gardens built for the children
Loved high-ranked women, fast cars and music
Blonde and loud and honey-thick
His son, the nail-biter, came late to supper
Then he sniffed him, hit him, screamed
You stink of rabbit hutch!
Don't play with the grubby kids
Do it like your brothers!
And one day he missed a curve clean
They peeled him out of a shell of scrap
Later, limping through the streets
People saw him on some days
Blowing songs on a comb
Wearing rat fur on his collar
Limp-hopping after children
Wanting to block their way to school
And skulking around rabbit hutches
One day in broad daylight
He charmed a child
And dragged it into a hutch
They found his corpse floating round in the rat pond
And all around the grubby kids
Don't play with the grubby kids
Go uptown
Do it like your brothers!