Category: Corpus

Waiting beneath broken bridges each week
can show no yield for the warty and odd.
Once, a goat passed whose face and voice were weak,
whose promises of his brother’s blood awed
me into letting him cross as a guest.
My gut could taste succulent goat offal
as a plumper kid soon came, but I should’ve guessed
that this one would get me something awful.
“Kill my bigger brother,” he lowed aloud,
“He ate our mother. He is no Gruff heir.”
“Fine,” my stomach grumbled, and I allowed
his passage as my belly swelled with air.
A bear-sized goat then bore down on me, heeling
my hairy head, which is just now healing.

Remove the spectacles, scarlet letter,
and the mercurial mythologies.
Grant a mask-less moment so I may ask
the being we have named the Man of Steel:
Did it hurt when you heard that you were not
Jonathan’s and Martha’s little boy Clark,
not even a boy at all, but some thing?
Did you weep any of those salty drops
of lost trust that leak out the reddish eyes
of your youngest fans when they discover
that Santa’s really just Dad’s MasterCard?

Is that why you prefer a glasses-mask,
to hide your own tired, dried-out, cried-out eyes?
Or are tears products of man’s reaction
and lowly to higher life forms like you?