The Science of the Damned
                     For Peter

You promised to ruin my day, and did.
This impressed me – not the gift
so much as a kept promise.
This is not about mundane
human relationships, since
we haven't one, except as writers
chronically struggling
to deal our demons a bad hand.

You do this almost daily. I can't.
My demons are too strong, become
immune, mutate like viruses.
But this is no competition.
Let us return, then:  you promised to ruin
my day, the promise metastasized,
now guns my blood like poison gas.

I'm new again, like last time,
which lapsed.
The torture of animals.
Your poem. That movie, 
as if things weren't bad enough,
which, obviously, they weren't.
There is no forgiving you,
the promise-keeper.

My eyes are so wide open
they can't blink, which smarts.
They are dry, but stream. So.
You have brutalized with fealty.
Nonetheless, a gift: I realize again
there is no safe place. You said,
this is not my world.  Nor mine.

What we do to others, to innocents
in particular, is ineffable.
Words are pathetic.
You can chain one up for years
inseminate it with great meaning,
milk it until it collapses, and serve it
for dinner.  It doesn't mind.

Or maybe dangle it by a letter,
an J or Y might work well,
slit its throat as it chomps shoved metal,
electrocute it up the ass,
rip its fur off head to paw
while it babbles bloodily on,
or club and skin it in front of
the bigger words that house it.

It won't protest, writhe, or howl.
You can toss words in chambers
until they suffocate, or into
garbage trucks and crush them,
or even, say, stun them,
with your grand poetic facility.
They will feel nothing,
will do your bidding voluntarily,
feel much like, say, air does.

I thank and damn you.
So what now?
Do we continue to write of
the butchered that are we?
Or otherwise?  Why write at all?
Will it help the harpooned whale?
Will it blue up the red red sea?

I'm asking, though I know.
We will continue, addicted
to our myopic miseries.
Soon, though, we will do other.
We are prodded.
For now, we can encourage others:
mourn these protacted atrocious
sleeps.
And weep, oh with me,
weep.

 - Julie K. Shavin 11 09