Dickhead

A man who’s trying to be a good man

but isn’t, because he can’t not take

whatever’s said to him as judgement.

It causes him, as he puts it, to react.

His face and neck redden and bloat,

a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead

and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children

but provoking hilarity at work

where one guy likes to get his goat

by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers

on his computer screen while he’s in the john,

then gathers a group into the next cubicle

to watch when he comes back.

He has talked to his minister and to his wife

about learning how not to react,

to make a joke, and he has tried to make jokes,

but his voice gets tense, they come out flat,

so even his joke becomes a joke at his expense,

another thing to laugh at him about.

He has thought to turn to them and ask,

Why don’t you like me? What have I done to you?

But he has been told already all his life:

self-righteous goody two-shoes, a stick up your ass.

They are right. He has never never never gotten along.

He says nothing this time, just peels off the bumper sticker,

crumples it gently, places it gently

by his mousepad to dispose of later properly,

comparing his suffering to Christ’s in Gethsemane

spat upon and mocked (his minister’s advice),

and tries a smile that twists into a grimace,

which starts the hot blood rising into his face.

This is what they came for, to see Dickhead,

the bulging vein, the skull stoplight red,

and indeed it is remarkable how gorged it gets

as if his torso had become a helium pump,

so, except for him whose eyes are shut tight,

they burst into laughter together exactly at the moment

cruelty turns into astonishment.

Source: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)