Raymond Keen

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Ixion

Someone is always dying of cancer,
Someone is always reading The New York Times.
After your mother died,
We found love letters in the attic.
I know, I know.  She was tortured in the camps.
Do you remember those once white hands?
Do you still recognize yourself
In your European skin?
But it’s not worth crying about.
It’s not worth crying about now!

The savage had turned humanist.
Then the humanist returned
To savage again,
Returned through dream-time
To Eve’s original apple,
Already from the beginning
Spoiled-brown with worms,
Nullifying en route in the backward-careening fall
The vision of Michelangelo’s David,
His orbs now swimming with maggots,
This phenomenon once and forever
Established as reality
By an Argus-eyed and exacting Science.

Cain murdered Abel,
And he has remained Cain
Or Ixion or Hitler
Or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot,
The prodigal son returning home
To murder his family.
Now all of us are
“. . . bound upon a wheel of fire . . . .”
“We are all sons-of-bitches now.”
But it’s not worth crying about.
It’s not worth crying about now!

(first published in July/August 2005 Issue of The American Poetry Review)

 Holiday Madness, 1976

At Christmas I opened many
battery-operated gifts.
Where are the batteries?
On Monday
the bank teller
tells me
that Norbert Wiener is the Anti-Christ.
But who is Norbert Wiener?

Tuesday the voices
tell me to clean up
the mess.
“Just clean it up!”
they say.
I remember the flowers
on her pretty pink dress.
(I didn’t really
look at the dress
or her body under the dress,
but I looked at
the flowers on the dress.)

On Thursday I go
to the library.
I read where
Norbert Wiener’s critics say
that uniformity is the
work of the Devil.

Today is Friday.
The voices tell me
it’s the end of the world.
And the light in the sky is the sun.
The voices say,
“Look, look at that sun!
Open your eyes wide
and look at that sun!”

(first published in July/August 2005 Issue of The American Poetry Review)

 

Raymond Keen was educated at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Oklahoma.  He spent three years as a Navy clinical psychologist with a year in Vietnam (1967 - 1968).  Since that time he has worked as a school psychologist and licensed mental health counselor in the USA and overseas, until his retirement in 2006. 
Love Poems for Cannibals, published in February 2013, is the author’s first volume of poetry.  He is also the author of a drama, The Private and Public Life of King Able, which will be published in 2016.  Raymond’s poetry has been published in 32 literary journals.