The Best Shovel for Concrete and Sand – sample
LUDDIE AND ADDIE, BEST MATES
we weren’t allowed to stand next to each other
at the photo, but we got as near as we could.
He put on his glaikit look, I did my already famous
fuhrer pose, and then-CLICK- it’s fixed for posterity.
Posterity, was already the purpose of our lives
even as wee boys meeting in the playground
we were for the future and for this our lives
would be troubled and truncated
we saw this in each other and understood
that this was the price fate charges for brilliance;
tension, uncertainty, detachment, isolation and
suspicion from the others, as if we cared (ha ha!)
and that’s how we became best mates despite
the extreme social distance between us, or rather
perhaps because of it, demonstrating to the others
our indifference to the days’ social conventions
the necessary foundation for our future roles
you with dialectic, me with rhetoric, but both
with logic in our respective domains, the world
of the mind, the world of blood and soil.
Although I know that you would deny it
I came to think that it was not an accident
that brought us together, some cosmic interest
needed us the be templates to each other
of how to resist society’s blandishments
and petty tyrannies, of how to hold fast to
the self’s true role amidst uncertainty
and mockery, as prep for persecution
you, hardly listening to the lessons, never mind
the jealous mockery of your intense intelligence
me, reveling in rejection by my moral inferiors;
let them joke, for sure they won’t always be laughing!
Best mates, the Jew baron and the future Fuhrer.