Goya's Mired Men Fighting with Cudgels

The violence done to the mind by the weaponized 

word or image is bad. 

We can live with it, though

We can understand it. Or we can try. And we 

can consider ourselves lucky, which we are. 

Nothing can be understood 

about the blunt-force trauma to the head. 

The percussion grenade. 

The helmet-to-helmet hit at an aggregate speed 

of forty miles an hour. 

No concussion protocol comprehends the self’s 

delicate apparatus crumpled in the wide pan of the brain.

The roof collapsing in Aleppo. 

The beam slamming the frontal lobe. 

The drone, the terror by night and day. 

He wanted to remember it all, 

to fix the image cradled inside the image 

of itself, itself, itself

down the facing mirrors of future and past, 

and then he wanted to be left to die there, 

in the ditch where he was cudgeled

down and under— 

ground water seeping into his mouth,

himself becoming ground water.

But he felt a hand reach down and grab him 

by the collar and yank him back up

and set him on his feet. 

And as he steadied himself, he thought,

This compassion he feels for me as his

mirror enemy, image, brother in wrath, 

and that I feel for him, 

this compassion is the compassion that those 

who see themselves in agony feel. 

But there is the other compassion, the one

felt by those who see agony in themselves,

which the deaf master will feel 

when he imagines us poised and ready to recapitulate

our thinking’s frozen violence—

the great deaf master, 

living in the villa of the deaf, 

where he will paint us in silent pastels.