I am good and I am bad

J.T. Whitehead

I am the sexless child of Time and Truth.

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I am the revolutionary to your Capital.

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I am the missing tapes.

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I am the civil rights to your Klan.

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I am the diagnosis of terminal cancer to your prayers.

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I am the verdict to your defense.

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I am the acquittal to your prosecution.

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I am the prophylactic to your Pope.

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I am the never-ending to your apocalyptic dreams.

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I am the 22nd Amendment to your President Reagan, your Nixon, and not just your Roosevelt.

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I am the tombstone to your firearm.

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I am the union of Time and Truth.

I am the child of what no amount of money can vanquish.

I am the child of what no amount of faith can overcome.

I am the child of what no amount of charm can change.

I am the child that does not read your press.

I am the child that knows, the Emperor wears no clothes.

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I am the admission that reduces the prison sentence.

I am the confession that saves the family.

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I am the septuagenarian widow’s new love.

I am the adopted child’s new father.

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I am allied bombers hitting the bunker in Berlin.

I am the ruins of a temple to a forgotten faith.

I am the illustrated books that turn un-worshipped gods into drawings for children.

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I am a philosopher standing on the shoulders of a philosopher.

I am a scientist standing on the shoulders of a scientist standing on the shoulders of a scientist.

I am a mathematician standing on the shoulders of a mathematician.

I am a chess master expanding the knowledge of a chess master.

I am a poet reading a poet reading a poet reading a poet reading a poet.

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I am the scandal that you could not hide as well as you hid your forbidden love.

I am the mold on your bread.

I am the scavengers that get high on the marijuana seeds in your trash.

I am the newspaper article that your employees at your media empire did not write.

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I am smarter than you are for all your education.

I am smarter than your laws because they end and I do not.

I am more believable than your faith because I am its source and hope.

I count more than your accounting because I am never fully accounted for.

I last longer than your history because I last longer than the authors of it do.

I am time and I am truth and I am both and I am their child.

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I am the divorce at the end of the affair.

I am the lonely housewife without the home.

I am the lonely husband without the kids.

I am the pension divided.

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I am the consequence that consequential ethicists did not consider.

I am the odds that defied the odds-makers.

I am the odds that did not.

I am 100 percent probable.

I happen, always.

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I am the end to dueling when and where it ends.

I am the end to slavery when and where it ends.

I am the end to child labor when and where it ends.

I am the end to polio.

I am the beginning and end to all disease.

I am the beginning and end to all cures.

I am the end to war when and where it ends because everything ends, except what I am.

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I am the abused child who makes her way to her Grandfather’s house.

I am the abused child who rounds up her pajamas and toothbrush for the shelter.

I am the abused child who grows up never to wear pajamas.

I am the abused child who sees her mother finally leave it all.

I am the abused child who earns the PhD.

I am the molested child who grows up to publish his poetry.

I am the molested child who grows up to make law.

I am the molested child who grows up to study in Oxford.

I am the molested child who grows up to turn his eyes inside out in Amsterdam.

I am the molested child who grows up and gets paid to keep child molesters in prison.

I am the abused and molested child who finds love.

I am the child of the union of time and truth, molested and abused by both.

And I am still here, still alive, still thriving.

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I am the butterfly to the cocoon.

I am the cocoon to the caterpillar.

I am the caterpillar to the butterfly.

I am the time it takes truth to unfold and fly off, fly off and above and away.

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I am the crash of your Wall Street.

I am your Great Depression.

I am the ends you make meet.

I am the crash of your car.

I am your unmet ends.

I am your post-traumatic depression.

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I am the chicken and the egg.

And I always come last

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I am the rusty nail, the buried bone, the dried cork.

I am the crumbling of columns amidst chalky clouds.

I am the fences winds bend.

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I have spun the silk.

I have jammed the log.

I have tamed the shrew.

I have come before you.

I have boiled the frog.

I have come after you.

I have soured the milk.

I am coming for you.

I am Time.  I am Truth.  You are done.  And I do.

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That hot date throwing up in your toilet?  That was me.

That check your spouse bounced paying for those inexplicable hotel bills?  My work.

That late period?  Me.

I was the child.  Truth went inside.  Time took it all.  I was born.

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When Shakespeare wrote his plays, let me ask you, who owned the Globe Theater?

When you enter that campus library named for that donor, what did they do? Who are they?

That Art Museum you took your own children to visit, who was it named for again?

That school you graduated from, whose name is on it, you know, but what was his deal?

Who owned the businesses that made the Union cannon when Lincoln freed the slaves?

You don’t know.  I don’t know, either.  I am a forgetful child.  I remember what matters.

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My father is the Truth.  He fucked my mother.  My momma is Time.  I was born.

When they took me on vacation they showed me these sights.  These sites.

I went to battlefields.  I visited Presidents’ homes.

I was taken to those Art Museums named after allegedly fascinating people.

I saw athletes perform remarkable feats, without knowing that each had an owner, was owned.

I found it impossible to believe that anyone could own what they did on those courts and fields.

When asked what I remembered about those travels, I remembered . . . swimming.

I went swimming in the pool with my father.  I remembered that.

I never remembered the names on the buildings.

Did you? 

Do you? 

You don’t.

I don’t. 

I remember swimming in the pool.

My father was the Truth. 

My mother was Time. 

I was their child.

I could have remembered the names on those buildings.

But why?

The swimming pool was free.

And I can’t be bought.

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I am the empty gas gauge.

I am the flat tire.

I am the smelly carburetor.

I am the ancient transmission.

I am the outdated engine.

Who made this car, anyway, before we ran it down, you and me?

Hundreds of men and women.

But their names are not on it.

The name on it belongs to someone else, someone who didn’t do shit.

And everyone knows it.

And if they don’t know it yet, give it time.

I can be an impish child. 

I can make trouble. 

I can remind.  Remind is what I do.  Always. 

Half the time it’s ignored.

Beware the other half.

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I don’t twist my wedding band nervously while checking into the hotel.

I don’t look over my shoulder putting the key in the door.

I don’t worry about being caught.

I don’t hide it.

I have nothing to hide.

I tell her to put her head on his shoulder on the elevated train riding back from Wrigley.

Everyone sees them.

I tell her to dance to Frank Sinatra in the streets of London in the rain.

Everyone hears the music blaring from the nearby club.

And everyone sees them.

I tell them to go to the fitness center in the 5-star Asian hotel and work out.

Everyone sees them.

The attaches see them.

The businessmen see them.

The military brass sees them, for what they are, despite their disparity of rank.

The spies see them.

The white-haired men see them.

They see what the Londoners saw.

They see what the Chicagoans saw.

They see Love unadorned and innocent and bare.

I don’t hide in the dark in the middle of a summer’s day.

I’m not a cockroach.

I am the birth that results from the union of Time and Truth.

I am an innocent and naked child.

And like all children, I want to eat the world.

But I’m not a cockroach, hiding in the dark.

I have nothing to hide.

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I am also a cockroach.

And if you doubt it, try to kill one sometime.

I can’t be killed.

For all the killing I go on.

For all the attempted killing, I go on.

I am the killing that does not kill me.

In this way I am very much like your history.

Like a cockroach, so much of it is in the dark.

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I was Stalingrad.

I was not at Stalingrad.

I was Stalingrad.

I was Hegel confronting Marx. 

Not as philosophies, not as philosophers, not as words on a page.

More like cell mates in a prison . . .

From a story by Jack London.

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Did you not grasp the last verse?

Too many books, too many writers, too many thinkers?

Then read.

I am every book in print.

I am every book ever written.

I am every book long since lost.

And I am the one that took them away.

My mother buries them all, with tears and flowers, and no eulogy ever spoken.

She is their caretaker in the end.

It is her womb to which they return.

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I am the Kilimanjaro the rain clouds cut down.

I am the Rockies the rains erode.

I am the fences winds bend.

I am the rusty nail.

I am the buried bone.

I am the dried cork.

I am the crumbling of columns amidst chalky clouds.

I am the limb in the stomach of the shark.

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I am the age that believes in Shiva the Destroyer.

I am the age that no longer knows this god.

I am millions believing in Christ the Redeemer.

I am the age in which his name is dust.

I am the message of the Buddha.

I am the time in which his name is unspoken.

I am ageless. 

I am not godless. 

I am fickle when it comes to gods.

My mind changes when it comes to them all.

My mother buries them all.

She buries them with tears and flowers.

And no eulogy is ever spoken.

There is no eulogy to Apollo.

Have you heard one?

She simply buries them under time.

It is her womb to which they return.

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My mother is unlike the gods.

My father is unlike the gods.

My father and mother are never finished.

Unlike the gods.

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I am my mother and father.

I am all the time in the world.

I am all the truth, some yet unspoken.

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I am unfinished.

I am never done, forever.

J.T. Whitehead received a BA in English and Philosophy from Wabash College, an MA in Philosophy from Purdue, and a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He spent time between, during, and after school on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead now practices law by day and poetry by night and lives in Indianapolis with his two sons. Whitehead was briefly the Editor-in-Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library and has published poetry and prose in numerous journals including The Lilliput Review, Slipstream, Left Curve, The Broadkill Review, and Poetry Hotel. Whitehead’s poetry and stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and he was the winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize (2015).  His first full-length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2015.