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WORMS MORE MODISH THAN ARMY ANTS
Towers
crack.
sliced by fanatic impact
and miles of concrete and
thousands of people fall in fire.
See other poets for cosmic import,
politics and magnitude of emotion.
Outside of devil-bearded dogma-benders
and their sappy milk-and-maiden honey-
heaven hypnotized assassins,
intending ending,
cracking an already chasm'd Earth apart,
outside of them
face forward, dossier'd, as a force to fear
of explosions and poisons; the
spreadable deathbites
of germs too tiny for sight
to panic us in outside space and
nibble our inside skin with fear;
weaved in and out of these,
before these struck and with us still
is a subtler enemy
accepted and common as germs but
more wormy to our society
than any skyhigh or flesh-intimate
explosive or poisonous terror.
They
smile of course
and seriously say they're here to help
but once in their asylum beds
they fry the brains electrically
and madly multiply the mental ills they
claim to cure—
psychiatrists, of course,
who ask for essays of death in classes
then take the essayists into
closed-in custody for being morbid;
who,
seeing signs of life
in kids (who are our future and our life),
name the ebullience something else
and drop them to stun them.
Their pills are slower—sometimes—but
more thorough than a plague disease,
especially if given to babies.
A vigorous people
can fight fanatics and fire;
for poisons, antidotes can be found.
A people awake, even in grief,
can rise up in anger;
a live people, even afraid,
can be aroused to motion.
Smiling,
soothing-voiced bastards!!—
they advertise on the radio now
to draw in the trauma-distressed of
this time, smiling with
drug-colored molars they intend
to eat a whole society with.
The product people of their therapy
are wreckers or robots.
Why should armies, even armed to the teeth,
wear themselves out
trying to beat us
when whitecoated worms—or worms
in dark suits—can, with their
druggish therapy,
transform us to legions of sluggishness
and suicides and murderers
pouring poison-brained out of our kindergartens
a mash of zombie-heads and
Timothy McVeighs.
And
they'd have their institutions ready,
these psychiatrists,
closing-doors of commitment,
new concentration camps—
nothing new in history, though.
It was psychiatrists first
who spawned the idea of the cleansing ovens.
German psychiatrists
taught the Nazis how to do it.
They had done it.
In the midst of our fighting,
for revenge; for retention of our
law-given liberties; for a better, more
in harmony with nature or ourselves existence;
for a higher lovelier world, more
well fed, more free—
whatever we choose to be fighting for—
of these civil-seeming, glumfaced doctors
whose hands of healing hold out death
be afraid, be very afraid.
A hydrogen bomb
would take us to the savage state.
They'd take us down
to no state at all, but grow fat
as they crawled
in our coffins.
Bob
Hart is a New York City poet and a regular at the
Pink Pony West Poetry Reading series. His
chapbook, Acrobat, has just gone into a second
printing. |