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46 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky Take That! An hour from now, your flaccid fat will flow, man by man, out onto the clean street, and here I’ve revealed to you so many boxes of verse, I—the spendthrift and prodigal of priceless words. You there, man, you’ve got cabbage in your mustache from some half-eaten, unfinished soup somewhere; you there, woman, your white makeup’s so thick, you peer out like an oyster from a shell of things. All of you will pile up on the butterfly of the poet’s heart, dirty, in galoshes and without galoshes. The crowd will go nuts, rubbing against itself, bristling its little legs, the hundred-headed louse. And if today I, a crude Hun, should be disinclined to make faces for you—well, then I’ll burst out laughing and spit with joy, spit in your faces, I—the prodigal and spendthrift of priceless words. 1913 ...

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