The Liberal
They settle in. Testosterone
and an obvious need for decision
as to who gets top bunk, top spot
in rapes, main share of the food, etc.,
reciprocally cause each other. Plus
ideology: Aryan Christian types,
more common-or-garden
bigots, and other believers contend
for corporate spokesmanship. The few
real corporate figures who weren’t
sufficiently faceless to escape
my dragnet try to act
like regular, prayerful, duckhunting guys,
but learn that distance is the price of love.
(In another block, the women
find their own ways to hierarchalize.)
The room, initially clean enough,
soon smells the way these places do.
When I allow a meeting,
manifesting myself
on an indestructible screen high in the wall
as a rigid golden figure like an Oscar,
they get it together, proving
the ultimate necessity of reason.
They elect a charismatic or Opus Dei
Father to follow my directions through
the wall, to my universe. When his
anathemas, prayers, impotent
violence are exhausted he remarks
that I’m as much a prisoner as they;
that unless perfect love casts out fear
there is no end short of eternity.
I tell him to preach this to his flock.
Predictably he won’t accept the point;
sees only power and a loathsome pity
sculpted into a stylized golden man.
So through that monitor the inside
of the mind like a warden watches
the outside pace and hate;
and cannot look away, and broadcasts
Tolerance and Rights and Science,
the whole dispirited reflex rosary,
to no avail. I think my charges, clients,
(masters perhaps?) are worthless
because they doubt these things;
they know I think this of them
and therefore despise me and will never
listen to anything I say, and are therefore
worthless. The mind holds them
the way a captive is held
one doesn’t know what to do with
but can’t allow to roam unsupervised
(which is why anyone is kept in hell
or, really, any of the nearer places).
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