When reading me, I want you to feel
as if I had ripped your skin off;
Or gouged out your eyes with my fingers;
Or scalped you, and afterwards burnt your hair
in the staring sockets; having first filled them
with fluid from your son’s lighter.
I want you to feel as if I had slammed
your child’s head against a spike;
And cut off your member and stuck it in your
wife’s mouth to smoke like a cigar.
For I do not write to improve your soul;
or to make you feel better, or more humane;
Nor do I write to give you any new emotions;
Or to make you proud to be able to experience them
or to recognize them in others.
I leave that to the fraternity of lying poets
–no prophets, but toadies and trained seals!
How much evil there is in the best of them
as their envy and impotence flower into poems
And their anality into love of man, into virtue:
Especially when they tell you, sensitively,
what it feels like to be a potato.
I write for the young man, demented,
who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima;
I write for Nasser and Ben Gurion;
For Krushchev and President Kennedy;
for the Defense Secretary
voted forty-six billions for the extirpation
of humans everywhere.
I write for the Polish officers machine-gunned
in the Katyn forest;
I write for the gassed, burnt, tortured,
and humiliated everywhere;
I write for Castro and tse-Tung, the only poets
I ever learned anything from;
I write for Adolph Eichmann, compliant clerk
to that madman, the human race;
For his devoted wife and loyal son.
Give me words fierce and jagged enough
to tear your skin like shrapnel;
Hot and searing enough to fuse
the flesh off your blackened skeleton;
Words with the sound of crunching bones or bursting
eyeballs;
or a nose being smashed with a gun butt;
Words with the soft plash of intestines
falling out of your belly;
Or cruel and sad as the thought which tells you
“This is the end”
And you feel Time oozing out of your veins
and yourself becoming one with the weightless dark.
By Irving Layton at Poetic Outlaws
