“Fuck you!”
is all people seem to think I’m good for,
as though evolution had saved
this one
putting-assholes-in-their-places niche
just for me,
as though a jeer
were all I were or could ever be.

No Solomon
in truth was ever more solemn,
no monastery more stern
than this office of informing one’s lessers
of their shortcomings,
of the manifold ways they fail,
invariably,
to measure up.

Think Abraham
Lincoln
as played by Raymond Massey,
or Michael Rennie as the noble alien
in The Day the Earth Stood Still,
come to convey
his grim admonition to humankind
to shape up or else.

Think Gregory Peck
in To Kill a Mockingbird.
(No one in the theater could ever be this good.)
Think Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath
or 12 Angry Men or Failsafe
or who knows how
many pictures
he loped his lanky decency
through.

I am of the tribe of these gaunt, leading men.
Sentinel and steeple, promontory
and lighthouse, monolith
and obelisk.
Robed pinnacle presiding
over the Sanhedrin of the fingers.
Bedouin patriarch. Pontiff. The one true north
off which everything
slopes, to which everything aspires
and falls short.

Some days
I wonder how anyone can stand
to be themselves.

From this sad height
I look down on them all,
parading around on the esplanade
of the palm,
tricked out in the only torsos
they’ll ever know.

The scrawny snivelers cowering
across from the bowling ball bodies
of the bullies and blowhards;
the mesomorphs,
jocks without an ounce on them
of the fat of self-doubt,
unable to comprehend the flat-assed also-rans,
clinging and fawning.
                    And look:
there’s me too.
Self-appointed, towering tulip of rectitude!
Aloft. Aloof.
Candle. Javelin. Dad
frowning over your shoulder
all your life.

Thin bone of flame
rising.