Violence is the last resort of the exhausted sensibility
— Karl Shapiro
I
Years ago, Sodomites were strung up by their legs,
spread eagle, arms tied down, then sawed in half.
Since that position allows blood to rush to the head,
it is assumed many were conscious and feeling pain
until the saw passed the navel, sometimes the heart.
I guess such torture is rooted in the erroneous belief
that all gays like it up the ass, so bring on the saws.
I know a young gay guy, he’s cute, but doesn’t read books.
He has no idea that homosexuals were punished by such
exquisite means years ago. He lives in a big American city
where he takes sex and freedom for granted,
the way we take for granted flying and abstract art.
He knows all Madonna’s songs by heart.
II
There are always those who stand by and watch
when great horrors happen to the unfortunate.
Artists must do this to get the details right.
We have gapers’ block on the expressways.
In a sixteenth-century German etching that shows
a Sodomite being sawed in half by the Inquisition,
the artist deftly outlines the layer of skin and fat
above the great muscles of the buttocks,
as a toothy saw rips through tissue and bone.
And then there are the two men who work the saw,
pulling and pushing, as if this flesh were a log
that had to be split into planks for furniture.
The screaming alone would tell them this was not wood,
but a human being, a man, not a side of beef,
then again, he was a fag, a homo, a queer,
butthole screwing Sodomite, and the nice thing
about civilization is that you can always find
people willing to do the dirty work for money.
Today, deep in a silo in North Dakota, two other men
have their fingers on scarlet buttons that will launch
thermonuclear fire on half the cities of the USSR.
One reads a comic book while the other works
a computer that rivals in complexity an insect brain.
He spends his leave in San Francisco drinking beers,
the other is from Texas, says he hates queers.
III
Roger is in the hospital, kept alive by tubes.
His friends are all whispers and worries.
On Fire Island, waves ignore the sick and lap ashore.
Near the deck of a beach house, a man
clothed in the cool whites of summer,
contemplates the simplicity of far away lights.
Two drinks sweat on a bamboo table.
A clove cigarette curls to ash in a shell.
He swirls his tonic with ice and takes a sip.
Above a mahogany desk, in the guest room,
an elegantly framed sixteenth-century etching
reminds us of the dark line of details
needed to maintain an illusion of reality.
The eye and the heart assemble from fragments
what they desire—like the trails protons leave
in a cloud chamber, there is evidence, but don’t
bring it up, for now, only our red geraniums suffer.
Rich in blood they bleed into the black, absorbent night.
Robert Klein Engler is an award-winning poet whose work can be found in print and on the web—just google his name or go to amazon.com for his books.