by Mutt & Jeff
Should I
have found myself
with a broken filament connected to a beadwire chain,
only a sporadic
connection flashing between antipodes lighting my apartment,
smells of chutney and ginger cauliflower wafting between the
wooden planks
separating me
from the apartment below,
a wedge of peppered potatoes
left over from my starch and sourdough supper the night
before?
Should I
have found myself
with a wife used to theatre and pearls,
with children used
to a father at home,
locked
behind a door,
chained to
a mahogany desk and squeaky cogged typewriter?
And then my wife moving upstate to live in her parents
chandeliered home,
and her
believing everything said about me,
she telling my
son that his father is a traitor,
should
then my friends
whom I met at Hammer’s Deli
not come around or answer letters?
I should
have then felt kinship to Meursault,
finding myself absurdly positioned,
on trial
for an entire nation’s ignorance,
not caring for the jeers and taunts of the fanatically
fervored,
the harmless
nonsense of a barbaric tongue,
and would I have then learned their language,
and called things,
named things
the way they named things,
then accepted,
finding work,
my wife
coming back after her pride’s acquittal,
I should have regained an audience which was never
necessary.
Should I
have betrayed my work
for the sake of continuing work?
Why go back
to 1950 to test myself?
McCarthy was not a man.
He is the tendon in the finger that pulls a trigger,
the sinew
in the shoulder that lifts the kirk,
the nervous
impulse which first raised a stick in troglodyte hands and smote down
the member to take a contrary stand.
I am the heretic wildhair slithering,
Sloughing naked in
the berry and briars,
With gasoline
poured and
Flambéed into a
tunnel seeking me out.
I doubt I should not,
Accepting my fate,
Strike hyperdermic at ankles.
My death, if the last, is freedom’s death.
The freest actions are chained if the mind is tame.
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