Captain Beatty as George W. Bush

A poem of 451 degrees

It was a pleasure to burn,
to smolder, to murder words,
combustible thoughts heaped in piles
like lifeless birds, to see black roses
bloom in the white,
imaginary sky, bleeding outward,
petals withering with cancer of the mind.
It was a pleasure.

Gasoline vapors stinging my eyes,
the charred ideas danced
like drunken fireflies
in the searing heat of righteous
Conformity.
What are these words,
these keepers of names,
intangible things that set fires in the brain?
They are uncontrollable,
and they must be snuffed out.

I am the man for the job.

I tried to warn him;
I could see the glisten
of betrayal in his eyes,
that vague shape of fear draped
over the itch of curiosity.
I told him what they were:
A siren song chorus
of meaningless screams,
promises leading to the pitfall of dreams,
but he wouldn’t listen.
They never do.
He sealed his fate with the turn of a page
sucked in by the current
that suffocates like the clenched fist of rage.
And now I have to kill him.

He’ll regret the day he took this foray
into the unknown jungle
of the black and the grey.
The long dead hands
of Shakespeare and Poe,
Faulkner, Chaucer, and Thoreau,
will welcome him with a cold embrace,
a tired, old cliché. He preferred
their company anyway,
but his ghosts could not protect him,
that’s why he ran away.

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