The Love Song of J. Alfred Everybody

poeticus peine buttuc

Will it be simple, after all?
After all the metaphysics, theorems come to trial,
After all the rhetoric mixed with protocol,
After all the anguish of the heart bitten with a smile,
With the universe rolled and flattened, flattened and rolled,
With one at a pillow neath her elbow snatching at my soul,
Will it be simple?

Will it be one question, after all?
Will it be one answer?
After all commandments broken and fulfilled,
After all the sayings seeking entry to the ears,
After all reminders carefully warmed and chilled,
Will it be a moment to force the crisis of the years?

Looking for the mermaids frolicking in the sea,
We see scales, tails, wet blown hair, no?
Is it spoons and cups of tea?
It is guns and scaled armor shedding cold and salty water
As they step upon the sandy shore
Obligating nothing more
Than win or lose forevermore
Decided by one question, by one quite simple chore:

“Will you join us, or will you die,
Here upon the beach? We have vision.
We have tread. We have a bullet for your head.
The choice is yours. Your answer, please. Ten seconds we will wait.”

A yellow fog and a yellow smoke jiggle the seconds in their paws
To turn the words within our swelling brains.
We feel one another, each to each upon the beach,
Yet we see guns pointed at us one to one.

“Forget your silly trousers! Forget your marmalade!
You will answer for yourself, not for another.”
What would Prince Hamlet do? What the Ancient Mariner? What the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò?
How the value of life to be weighed by life?
Who the sinner who needs to die that the world might be clean?
Where focus the eyes taking in and the eyes looking back?
When the winner—last man standing or down with barbaric yawp?
Deeming death a must for all, why not join the game?
The Categorical Imperative musters and moans . . .
The countdown groans . . .
“Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”

Remember the camps
And remember the tombs, Uncle Alfred, of your brothers who said, “No way.”
Pull your hair, Uncle Alfred, for the one who said, “I join,”
Uniformed in pride,
Decorated with cracked and squarish cross
Toppled
To boost a ragged master bent with hate.

Love never fails, Mr. Prufrock. People do.
They exit love.
Love waits.

And his service a jig for the jig-maker to blunt the blades
Of conscience and to flip the flickers of care from the echo seen
In eyes that speak to hearts that empathize.

After the war, with drop from glory unmewing memories
That,

like Queen Nefertiti, proud and glorious,
turning her head,
her eye plucked, her ear chopped,
de-alchemizing,
Changed from pride to horror
And fed his sleep with nightmares, the lost one asked if he could return.
There is a path.
He walked it, lesions scarring, nightmares abating.

The ocean roils. The countdown frays . . .


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