There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
To the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this
Properly you require a crowd of people
Wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
To dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
Man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel,
Shaped and chased in a traditional way,
And attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
At least two flags, a prince and a
Castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
Allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
A mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
Not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
More mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
And some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
Miles above your victim and dispose of him by
Pressing one small switch. All you then
Require is an ocean to separate you, two
Systems of government, a nation’s scientists,
Several factories, a psychopath and
Land that no one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
To kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
Is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle
Of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
– Edwin Brock
Tagged: death, Edwin Brock, free verse, unsettling, war
The Welcome Chamber
In the welcome chamber
somebody is always waiting to help you
with your hat or your coat. Somebody is always
handing you a cold drink, if it’s warm outside,
or a warm drink, if it’s cold.
Somebody offers to shine your shoes.
Somebody else offers to babysit the kids
for free, if you want to go out sometime, at night.
There are beds in the welcome chamber,
but you never see anybody sleeping in them.
If you spill something on the furniture,
nobody minds. “We’ll get it later,” they say.
Each time you go to the welcome chamber,
you feel a little guilty. Like maybe this
is something you shouldn’t be doing, or should
be doing for yourself.
You offer to help the women
with their cooking, their sewing,
their legal briefs and Gaussian equations.
“We’re fine,” they insist.
Instead, you make small talk
about commodity prices and the weather.
Everybody agrees with you.
“Sit anywhere you like,” everyone says.
You’re so terribly afraid
somebody is about to disappoint
somebody else,
and that everybody will be nice about it.
You try saying “Hi.” Everybody
in the welcome chamber says “Hi,” back.
It shouldn’t be so easy, you tell yourself.
There should be money involved.
There should be sirens, the almost surgical glare
of TV cameras. Somebody should be crying.
There should be dark shapes in the snow.
– G. C. Waldrep
First published in Antioch Review. Reproduced here with permission from the poet.
Tagged: free verse, G. C. Waldrep, social commentary, unsettling