Irving Layton – Inter-View
He comes with a notepad and tape recorder,
calved by some English department in the boondocks
and looking like an accountant tremulous
To do his sums or whatever it is accountants do.
Who knows? Who cares? He might be on welfare
for all I care and humping blue fairies for his meat.
So I hate him in that instant of self-insight
as I hate any man who broadens the streak
of cruelty in my nature. Like an civilized
Being in this century I want to be taken
for a Titan and to astonish everyone I meet
with my heroic compulsions and wisdom
Overhear people praise me for my good taste in
poetry and pretty women, not for those brutal thoughts
we bury like stolen bank notes in an airless cellar.
How dare he come bouncing into my parlour
scattering the false coins of bluffness and concern
his sleaziness effervescing like fizz in a glass
While he asks to pluck the mystery from my Self
with fake confession of trespass for bait?
But his orgulous face betrays him, and anyway
His hash was cooked long ago in God’s planet
where only poetry and truth endure
and the unicorn fleeter than the hounds seeking him
Sniffs out the puritan sick in his soul
and far from the lion’s roar,
the hyena slouching in for the kill.
11:1 p.25 (1986)