SUICIDE NOTE
for Louis Lingg (dead Nov. 10, 1887)



The day of the Haymarket Affair
I was making bombs with Seliger
in my small room and getting worked-up
as we talked about women exhausting themselves
over spinning machines fined for singing
of their half-remembered villages,
fined for staying home to care for
children stricken with pox and of the canary-dead
coal miners obiigedto buy in the company stoe
at 20% more than they would pay on the outside.

By evening, there were fifty round
and pipe shape contrivances with caps attached
and we celebrated the virtues of dynamite!. How cheerful and,
gratifying to light the fuse
in the neighborhood of a lot of rich loafers
who live off the sweat of other people's brows.
A lb. of this stuff beats a bushel of ballots.

We quit the rooming house, carrying between us 
by a stick through the handle, a small truck 
filled with bombs, which we left in the hallway 
of Zeph's Hall and went to take a beer 
in a nearby saloon, when a bomb hurtled 
though the air, glowing and sputtering, 
striking down Degan and other foes of the 
working man, changing the course of history.

I despise them, their order, their laws, 
their force-propped authority. I do not 
recognize the court's sentence. I'm to hang 
not for a crime, but because I refuse 
to be governed by the profit motive, labor
exploiters, children slayers, home despoiiers.
Last night 1 heard music from a ball somewhere.
I so wanted to go there and dance.
I can only hope that the girl who 1 loved,
when she presses her head against another
man's shoulder will sometimes pretend
he is me smelling her perfume.

Farewell, Adolph, Albert, August, George.
I will not follow you to the gallows
to wear the noose the plutocrats call justice.
A comrade smuggled in a special baby of a smoke,
not exactly a Havana, but top quality never-the-less,
inside a dynamite cartridge alive as the unborn
in a mother's womb. Certainly no time is better
than the present to sit back and inhale
the aroma of a good 5 cent cigar.

                                              -Willa Schneberg