What Rough Beast | Poem for October 2, 2017

He’s more fun at a party than the Drab Water Tyrant or the Slaty-backed Chat Tyrant, smoother in his approach than the Helmeted Pygmy Tyrant and certainly better less boring than the Fire-eyed Drab Breasted Tyrant. There’s probably more interesting to say about the mating rituals of the Red-rumped Bush Tyrant, the Cock-tailed Tyrant, and of course the Tufted Tit-Tyrant. For sure. However, today’s lesson is about the Spectacled Tyrant, who early on, well before his rise to tyranny, could not see well.He’d sit, only historically remarkable, in his elementary school desk and wonder how other people had so much vision, so much forethought, terrible powers of reason, he began to think that there was some technology he would have to invent to maintain his dignity. There was a technology but he didn’t have to invent them: spectacles. Throwing Christians to lions, wrestling giants, bear baiting, even wild sea park whale torture and US politics. He imagined seas of spilled blood and moonbig bonepiles gravity pulling the great red sea this way and that, and he imagined terrors that were especially terrors because no one knew how truly terrible they were and if they did they would smack their forehead and say were I to have only known sooner, but of course knowing sooner isn’t the secret, not knowing was the secret they had and now they’ve given up their only dignity: their secret. See, there he is crawling up the little silver pool ladder to the level where children his age were meant to sun rather carelessly or perhaps just heedlessly, as if the world would take care of them no matter what. This will only be stripped from them later in therapy, but that’s okay, they have their youth for this very little while, and now the Spectacled Tyrant has his sense back of being a student in a school where everyone can be entertained into doing his homework. No damage done.

Until his middle age. He began to take no pleasure in reading. There was nothing good to read. No one was writing well anymore. It was not refreshing, nor challenging. Definitely not “edifying.” All the good literature was already written, and any literature anyway after all only took up that one theme, mortality, and: yawn. And the old stuff, fine and well, but without a living literature of today, what is there to light the fire under the imagination, speculation: the grapes were withering on the vine, and going back to say Dostoevsky did give him some pleasure, sure, lots of pleasure for a short time, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of being the only mourner at the wake, and that’s no fun, now, is it? He didn’t have kids which maybe was the problem. Until he got glasses.

Then he still wondered a little about kids, even after he was reading voraciously and happily. Kids…aren’t they to be a pleasure in one’s old age, should he be cultivating his own little garden. His vanity desired an heir. Someone must take this beautiful soul, even if a watered down or maybe slightly slow version of this beautiful mind, forward. The problem: last thing he’d want: competition. Or worse: downbranding. After all one virtue was more virtue than two, why not forsake sons out of principle, daughters out of disdain for doting, and parenthood out of the deconstruction of gender roles? He could go one better and call it virtue, he could, so wise was he, not wishing to inflict himself on the future. He wouldn’t want to take up more room than he did now, which he did by accident and yes he knows that each breath is tugged from the limited air all tyrants share. The tyrant only breathes to feed folks or speak sense. The tyrant suffers as all tyrants suffer but the heft of his charge? Should he add one more beak to the choir of hunger he himself must feed? Saved once by humor, a second time by optometry, which science would the third time save him

from his excellence?