Figureheads

I've begun to think a bit too much in verse. Or at least to think a lot in verse. I don't know if it's too much. But I've started writing these little things about different historical people ("historical" being a broad term, I've written about musicians, political figures, writers, well I guess you could say that those are all the same thing, but damn you, please don't...) or my opinion/reflection/reaction to these historical people. So here I'm going to attempt to come up with four of those...I have two in my head right now, and we'll see if I work out another pair.

"Dessalines"
In the movie theater
when I was almost crying
behind those 3D glasses,
I had to ask myself,

would they have been right
if they had decided
to solely massacre
the human population

that was attempting
to usurp Pandora
from the rightful
peoples?

And what does that say
about your actions
in that time
right when you had declared

your nation apart from them--
Fanon would have it
that violence was the only way
you could become men again.

God,
I hate
such scary
judgment calls.


"Bello"
I think you had some
pretty good questions.
But did you really expect
to get answers?

You wanted to draw
lines in the sand
on the beach
of your history.

I admire that.
I really do.
And I'm sure there's plenty you believed
that I would say was full of shit,

but there's something to say
about us being ostriches--
our heads in the sand--
we aren't asking serious questions

but rather just trying to stir up thought
like Socrates or the Drake Equation
and there's a sort of beautiful sadness here,
isn't there?

That nothing will ever be known.


"Marx"
I'm not particularly mad
or anything
but you sure did
become the face
of a political organization
that has never seen the light of day.

And now
when I invoke identities for myself
people probably think
that I follow your way of thought
when I'd say the only things
we have in common

are our beards.


"Bukowski"
I'm not nearly as upset
by your influence on me
as are those followers of Virginia Woolf
who wonder why you were such an asshole

but it's an interesting thing
and not something I altogether support--
how you have captured
way too many things

that
when I only knew them
inside my own mind
I had thought, well, original.

And to think
if it hadn't been
for some throwaway conversation,
I probably never would've known your name,

and had to deal with
the humbling masochism
that is the writer reading
what has come before.