The Executioner of Academe

This poem first appeared in American Dissident.
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The Executioner of Academe

        "... It overtook him finally"
        Donald Justice's "In Memory of the Unknown Poet"


I am his story
I will always be his story
The brute boot put against his face--

This nameless poet, scrambling to find a place
Of tenure, or a sinecure, or a post
Where safely he can sit and think
And maybe write diacriticals or deconstructive verse.

I stalked him, I overtook him finally
in the hallways of The Academe, before he took his orals.
"Who is the victim today," I say
Within earshot of his trembling lip, his hairless chin.

My partners in this crime,
Professors of Medieval lit and the Metaphysicals,
Deferred to me--his executioner--the Modernist
As the most nearly able to judge the body of his work.

But I had already judged, found wanting this black-bespeckled bird,
And I was first to place my soft-leather boot in that face
And shove him back down the snake&ladder chute.
Aware (he was) now finally of the boredom and the horror....

Perhaps in the end he was not sad
Even in that moment when the oxford leather struck his face.
That was his story anyway, or it became his story
Of how he (narrowly) escaped the boredom and the horror.

When lately I have seen him wandering
From his job as cappuccino cashier to Wal-mart greeter,
I think back on that day, and it gives me cheer
For I had become the boredom and the horror.

It is all done now, but I can still remember
His effeminate voice, his one unfocused eye as it straggled
Limply along the text of his great masterwork,
His fading voice now no longer filled with poetry.

It is all now the horror and the horror.