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I wish to share my distress with you.
(Paper puppets dot the landscape.)
I'm dismayed, disgruntled, and deeply disturbed.
My soul is raging, roaring, roasting,
Wrothing over internal coals.
I fret so much I break into sweats.
(Little folded paper puppets
Rasp-rustle in my folded ears.)
I could howl, with neck distended,
Veins a-bulging, spittle spuming
Like rockmelt from a lava pus-pit,
Lungs inflated like bagpipe sacks,
Stormier, rantier than those preachers,
Gutter-crazies whose toes the rats
Have bitten off in the sprawls of night.
(Fussy paper mussy puppets!)
Or I could sit and write and write
Paranoid tracts, blaming my state
On the State, politicians, and petty officials,
Shopkeepers charging too much for beer,
Neighbors who play their music too loud,
Voices of invisible tyrants
Who press me to do things appealing-appalling.
And yes, I could resort to violence—
(Burn the papers! Fold the puppets!)—
A perpetrator of vigorous acts:
Smashing windows, stealing purses,
Bashing windshields on costly cars,
Rampaging naked through the mall . . .
(Make them scatter like so much litter,
Leaves and litter—blow away!)
And yet, and yet . . . that isn't quite me,
So like a monarch without his scepter;
The solution seems easy as ay-ar-fifteen:
Lemme go out and buy a gun.

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