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Page 68

The blank page as the core of evil
(poet as knight -- WHITE knight? -- challenging
evil): Serial killers and psychopaths
have, as our lurid media assure us,
eyes that are dead, flat, blank.

Criminals have the blank "thousand-yard stare."
The Ted Bundys practice before mirrors, disguising
blankness behind crinkly smiles, large-eyed
sympathy, mimicking what, through sniper eyes,
they see in the faces that bob past, ducks
in a shooting gallery.

But we expect human eyes to be alive, to return
(without calculation) our smiles, to share or resist
our tears. That's why we don't consider
the lack of response we receive from stones,
furniture, sidewalks, doorknobs and ash trays
evil -- do we?

But things don't kill us the way blank-eyed
humanoids do. Do they? Have you ever
stubbed your toe or bumped your head
or cut your finger on a thing, landed
on sidewalk, been burned by fire, frozen
by ice? As you fell from your bike
to skin hands and knees on concrete,
did you tell the sidewalk, "Don't!" or
"Please!" or "Help!" Did it respond?

Even the blank-eyed killer is blank because
he is waiting for something he mistook for life
to respond. He's been waiting so long
that he has become his waiting.

Note: So the Ted Bundys must practice at seeming human. I wonder about the McGeorge Bundys and their ilk. (The true species of our politicians is an ill-kept secret. They belong to an alien species known as the Ilk, because the secret is so ill-kept.)

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