LYRICS GAME

Don't play with the grubby kids

Don't sing their songs

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

They'd say then

Again you smell like a rabbit hutch

Don't play with the grubby kids

Don't sing their songs

Go uptown

Do it like your brothers

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

Singing full of scorn

Don't play with the grubby kids

Don't sing their songs

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

Don't sing their songs

Go to uptown

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

Blew on the comb

Don't play with the grubby kids

Don't sing their songs

Go uptown

Do it like your brothers!