Monday, September 9, 2013
THE SUPERFICIES OF SERVITUDE
Nos pavidi trepidare metu crinemque flagrantem
executere et sanctos restinguere fontibus ignis.
Aeneid, Book II, lines 685-686
One: The Navy Brat Changes Schools Yet Once Again
Each morning he contrives a pledge
Allegiance to the wedged
Mutations of his chromosomes,
Devoted to the wealth of others’ homes.
With daily recitations of his credo
And commissary gravy embedding mashed potato,
The brat, no doubt, is gratified to be fed
As pigs whose greasy welfare will be bled.
One replicates the thing one is devoted to:
The servitude his father was corroded through.
Only officers’ sons beribbon patrimony.
The brat salutes his father’s twenty-year enlistment
Whose moiety’s a lunch of mayonnaise and baloney.
The Navy Brat grows fond of obscure words:
Causerie. “Doesn’t what we’re saying make total sense?”
They jeer and tsk. Only to a bloated recidivist
Of absurdity, he wants to say, but playing dumb
Only proves their rules as jokes to be abused.
His disrespect is meant, since nothing else
Impales their mawkishness. He’s little more
Than excrement in their eyes. “You listen to me well
Small brat, inhale the smell of firm shit,
And praise the way it masticates your spit.”
Move here, sleep there, dangle from the rim:
The charisma of asthma strangles him.
His soul is insubordinate
To that which he should love as prickling fate:
Strange agony he hardly could endure
That now seems nothing more
Than penitential blur.
A chaplain listens to abhorrent
Sprees of sailors sloshed.
The fleet, in port, recoils.
As turrets mount a current,
The distant shame grows hushed —
The brat no longer needs their horns
To jazz his muted moan:
He’s got the suppurating forlorn blues.
His daddy’s headed out on a one-way cruise.
Butchwax shimmers; hormones rave;
Who’s there
to teach the eldest how to shave?
About Bill Mohr