An Open Letter from the Supervillain the Red Skull
An Open Letter from the Supervillain the Red Skull
And what if I went away? Gave up my vintage SS wardrobe?
What if I disassembled the repulsor rays, the secret submarines
I keep beneath arctic waters for rainy days and spontaneous
governmental coups? What if I set free my standing army?
Then what? Peace? Do planes suddenly avoid tragedy
upon my retirement? Do guns transmute to flora? Knives
to knitting tools? Can Steve Rogers or Steven Hawking
honestly make such an argument? No. Of course not.
But, still, even I fall victim to the occasional belief that I am
the Fountainhead of Evil, the one and only God of War.
So I take some time off, curl up with a few good books
in some quiet corner of some distant castle—windows shut,
doors locked, no incoming calls, no internet, no USA Today,
hardly even sunlight—and I call myself a pious monk of peace.
And I call the world a cogent mathematical formula,
a logic circuit that, without me as a conditional,
will eventually follow its own path to Truth, to Utopia.
Like any unwanted child, I know what you see when you look at me.
Still, imagine my surprise when, starving, half-mad from loneliness,
I emerge from my sabbatical fully confident that without me,
without this face, this visage that reflects what humanity is
most afraid of—bloody Death—the world will have become a bed of roses,
yet I find the Earth still swelling with graves, the sky thick with ash
and gun smoke, every boney face of man trying to hide the blood
beneath mere millimeters of flesh.
*This poem appears in The SNReview
Taken from “…hide behind me…”
click to hear me read this poem
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