His Future as Attila the Hun by Timothy Donnelly
But when I try to envision what it might be like to live
detached from the circuitry that suffers me to crave
what I know I’ll never need, or what I need but have
in abundance already, I feel the cloud of food-court
breakfast loosen its embrace, I feel the shopping center
drop as its escalator tenders me up to the story
intended for conference space. I feel my doubt diminish, my debt
diminish; I feel a snow that falls on public statuary
doesn’t do so sadly because it does so without profit.
I feel less toxic. I feel the thought my only prospect
lies under a train for the coverage stop. Don’t think I never
thought that way because I have and do, all through
blank October a dollar in my pocket back and forth
to university. Let the record not not show. I have
deserted me for what I lack and am not worth. All of this
unfolds through episodes that pale as fast as others
gain from my inertia: I have watched, I’ll keep watching
out from under blankets as the days trip over the
days before out cold on the gold linoleum behind them
where we make the others rich with sick persistence.
But when I try to envision what it might be like to change,
I see three doors in front of me, and by implication
opportunity, rooms full of it as the mind itself is full
thinking of a time before time was, or of the infinite
couch from which none part, and while the first two doors
have their appeal, it’s the third I like best, the one
behind which opens a meadow, vast, and in it, grazing
on buttercups, an errant heifer with a wounded foot,
its bloody hoofprints followed by a curious shepard back
to something sharp in the grass, the point of a long
sword which, unearthed, the shepard now polishes with
his rodent-skin tunic, letting the Eurasian sun play
upon it for effect, a gift for me, a task, an instrument to lay
waste to the empire now placed before me at my feet.
This poem was selected by Russell J. (Reader’s Services)
