‘Frightened by the Sound of His Own Voice’
by Harry Siegel
Your favorite bits of profanity punctuating poetry? I’ve got:
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad” and “there is some shit I will not eat.”
That first poem has just the one curse, as its second word, and fuck, it penetrates. It ends not even a dozen lines later with the admonition that, and I’m quoting from memory here:
Man passes misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.
The second poem, not much longer, has Olaf, “a conscientious object,” thrown into a dungeon by the president after he’s duly notified of the yellowsonofabitch’s unpatriotic assertions, also including “I will not kiss your fucking flag.”
Olaf dies there, and this poem, too, concludes with death and a bit on what gets passed, perhaps, between generations:
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
That led my poor popcorn jukebox brain to other lines and lists, about transmission and repetition, destiny and dignity, word-wielders wrestling with the ineffable.
There’s a bit from a noir—possibly jotted down somewhere inside this computer I’m typing on, or within the desk it sits atop, drawers filled with volumes of my often illegible scribblings, or maybe somewhere on the shelves with the page dogeared or the passage underlined or something about it scribbled in the margins inside one of the millions of pages heaped on jerryrigged shelves that might collapse and kill me some day in a patently ridiculous metaphor made manifest—from a noir, as I was saying, a bit about passion, mercy and justice I couldn’t quite remember, but kept itching at.
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