A Lesson From the Orphanage

If you beat up someone smaller than you

they won’t (and histories prove this) tell:

look at those people on the opposite side

of the planet: they want to beat us up but

they’re smaller so that’s okay. Not okay is

that most of us will die in the war between

us and them, because small equals (and mice

prove this) sneaky: their spies could spirit all

our nuke aids away and we’d never know --

nick the rocket-satellite knockout Star Peace

Comcodes right out of our shrinking pockets,

even our doomsday (the FBI can prove this)

doodads, the ones we mean to use on them,

the rats: and so when they kill us will we

have killed enough of them to win, whose

fist figures bigger in the end? And what’s it prove? --

In the Orphanage, hell, even if they do tell

on you there’s no one for them to tell it to.

*

From “The Unsubscriber: Poems”

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 122 pp., $20 )