“Write a poem in the voice of John Berryman about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the arrest of Jared from Subway.”
Henry sat in the dark. The television-box
blared white, blared blood, blared April in Memphis, Tennessee.
A great man fell upon the balcony,
shot through the throat by someone in the rocks.
The nation tore its hair and wept aloud.
Henry wept too, into his beard, for the black prince gone into the shroud.
Mr. King, he had the dream, he had the stride,
he saw the mountain-top and told us plain.
Then came the bullet, then came the terrible rain
of fire in the cities, far and wide.
Henry felt the world rock on its rusty pin.
The great soul fled, and let the chaos in.
Then the dial spun—whack!—the screen went green and blue,
decades hopped like fleas across the sheet.
A different sort of monster in the street,
a sandwich-man, the world thought that it knew.
Jared, who lost the weight, who smiled so sweet on the screen,
turned out to be the foulest thing Henry had ever seen.
The feds came down on Indiana, hard and fast,
for little girls, for horrors in the dark.
The cameras flashed, the dogs began to bark,
the weight-loss king was brought to earth at last.
Henry hid his eyes. Oh, the world is a rotten place,
where monsters wear a thin and public face.
Henry’s heart is cold for the prophet slain in the spring,
and Henry’s stomach turns for the creature in the cage.
A century of sorrow, a century of rage,
where bells of freedom and bells of madness ring.
He turned the television off. He went to bed.
The world is too much with us, Henry said.