The Scare Tactics
By John Grey
QuailBellMagazine.com
QuailBellMagazine.com
Make me read Chaucer will you.
Force Dickens, Tolstoy down my throat.
Instill in me the literary genius
of long dead white men
until I’ve got Dante coming out my ears.
Okay, so we sip more gentile Jane Austen
from time to time.
And Wuthering Heights,
though wasn’t that a Kate Bush song.
You plop me in a chair
and may as well strap me to it.
You open up a book,
typical bright light in the eyes job.
You start reciting Wordsworth,
stop at the end of the first line,
slap my face a little
with rhythm and meter,
demand to know
what does the poet mean.
I swear I have an alibi.
I wasn’t born in 1830.
I didn’t drown Shelley.
I didn’t tell Emily Dickinson
her work was totally unfit
for publication.
I just wandered into this literature class
because mathematics
was a kilometer over my head.
I haven’t read a book in years.
And that was just a paperback
I picked up in an airport store.
It wasn’t Homer.
It sure wasn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Just the story of some megalomaniac
who wanted to take over
the entire world.
Make everybody read Dostoyevsky
or something.