Archive
05/21/12
Pen's End
The same loving parents who breathed life into my fetal genes Breathed death, albeit unwittingly, Into the memory cells of every neuron in my olfactory system,
Causing me to harbor, hide, suppress, unknowingly, until 1967, An endless odor of hideous, obscene, grotesque Holocaust poems, The first such whiff of which was "Valediction Forbidding Despair."
And to say that I was perplexed, shocked, astonished, disturbed Is not to do justice to my horrific incredulity, my choking anxiety; Discovering those sickly vapors dripping off my pen-tip was an epiphany.
For the first time in my life, I'd awakened to those monstrous atrocities In the shape of a colossal Nazi-swastika scythe Being wielded, in a Heil Hitler salute, across all of quavering Europe,
Ripping through perfectly cultured civilizations, including Germany itself, Winnowing thousand-year accumulations of human striving, In a blitkrieging series of swipes, wiping out entire shtetls, ghettoes.
And oh, those death-breaths I kept inhaling, exhaling, Each another cattle-car rattle of endlessly goose-stepping stanzas Parading across the accumulating pages of my book of the dead,
Until I grew very too old enough not to intuit an end to it all, A final solution that would exterminate the odor of burning flesh That my parents had bequeathed me, at my birth, in 1941,
Quell the compelling poetic urgency to expel the smell Which had infected my entire archipelago of olfactory cells: I'd put an end, my pen's end, to my life, by writing myself out of existence.
05/21/12
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