Poem to George W Bush and the Thing that Lurks Beside Him
by Vincent Basso
[ poetry - october 11 ]
I once had a moth crawl inside my ear to tell a secret.
Now whenever I lay down to sleep
I cover the ear closest to heaven, to keep the bugs from crawling in
and turning on their serrated motor sounds.
You have to drown them in water or oil if they tunnel,
or else they’ll tear at your eardrum
until the light they breathe
spreads across the spiral valley of the cochlea,
tiny filaments like meditational glass oms lacing the brain.
In the paper there was a story about a man killed over drugs.
It said that these two young guys lured him to a house,
where their father and his girlfriend
gave him a hot dose. Then, still breathing,
they put him in a car in a church parking lot,
and set it on fire.
Paper said it was all over 150 bucks.
I switched on the TV,
and found the President on every channel
making a speech from the White House lawn.
His voice got weird on me. There were bad tremors to it.
I got so nervous I decided to take a drive,
and had to swerve
to keep from hitting this hairless hulk of a thing
dragging its hindquarters across the highway.
When I looked back the animal was gone,
and all was desert calm
beneath the magnetic heat and hum of power lines.
I once had a moth crawl inside my ear to tell a secret.
When I started to curse and smack myself in the head
the angel pressed its face against the night side of the windowpane,
and opened wide its mouth of stones.
All the devil things made sense:
the transient killers, people locked in basements,
kids torturing animals just for fun.
