Jehovah’s Witness
He trembled in the booth, the young man
with a palsy of some kind, his hand crimped,
spoon adrift, dark syrup inscribing arabesques
of terrible effort on the formica table.
He had come to eat ice cream in the diner,
to bathe the table with mucous and froth
under the eyes of the shy and disgusted
waitress. When he wished to speak,
his face twisted, his neck turned, as if
he were pushing stones with his tongue,
or ushering himself through the birth canal,
both of which seemed certainly true,
for it arrived in his mouth: an idea
crowning through blood with a mewl.
Amazing that he could even talk
given what seemed to possess him,
something awake along his spine
that made each part of him evangelize
in pieces of the Watchtower and his home
to come. And though it was chemistry,
ganglion queering the electrical flow,
I couldn’t help but think that his spasms,
the abrupt evasions, jerk and heave,
served to keep him out of reach
of that part of him which wished to die.
That it was only through will
that his hand clutched his coat’s collar
and not his throat—that his tongue
wrought a miracle when it ordered,
when at last he slipped the chains sufficiently,
allowing him to taste.
