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.