The Human Tassel Is Hanged at Dawn
For his crimes, among them scalping women, fondling
boys, and burning down banana orchards; for separatism
and discord, for being a fray in the very fabric. “Yet he unifies
us against him!” argues a single protester. “And a few of us still love
him—observe, there in the distance, his favorite gown waving
on his wife’s clothesline. Be merciful to him, let him live
behind vertical bars.” “No,” the sheriff shakes his head,
“this is the only way: prison could not keep him,
he would grab the door by both lapels and lift,
he would race away on all his legs, he would stream
like a fox hunt over fences, and when we sent our hounds,
they would chase their way right through him. No,
it must be done. Seat him astride the good gray mule
and ask for his last words.”
“Who can wound me?” the Tassel asks, cool, collected,
in a voice like a stalk of celery. “I am already one long
red maul, and already a sheaf of parallel papercuts;
how then will you kill me? Quote me to death,
the Thousand-Line Beast Epic of the West?
Who, tell me, and how?” “We will sew you to the end
of something,” cry the townspeople with pitchforks.
“We will drink you up, swallow of oxtail soup, and put
a bomb in your bellpull factory, and see you as you are,
and scatter you to the four corners of the cushion of the earth—
and we will, and now, and we will, and now.”
