The Accountable

I WENT into the booth of time
To vote the reason against the rhyme,
And pulled the curtain at my back
Its snakes of motion hanging slack;
The symbols squirmed on the machine,
I saw the names and numerals preen
And fate was waiting reverent
Upon its sole constituent
When a voice said over the telephone
As coarse as grinding gears its tone,
“Are you prepared, mayhem, mayhap,
To take the rap, the basic rap?”

I passed inside a window’s shop,
The land of living at the top;
Curtains of marble, gold and ice
Rehearsed a sample paradise;
The lights were bright with lack of air,
The mannequins’ breasts all hard and bare,
The decorations rose like hymns
Praising the silks on fashion’s limbs;
Their teeth against a storm of nights
The mirrors laughed in darks and lights;
Outside I saw the people mass
A wall of eyes against the glass,
When a voice came flowing over the phone,
A stream of rocks on a bed of stone,
“It’s cash, it’s credit, it’s a trap,
Are you prepared to take the rap?”

I found myself at a jury’s box
Whose panels pictured scales and clocks;
A window hung upon the wall
In which the sun was standing tall;
One eye of justice, bandage off,
The hub of swimming spokes of love,
Looked in and at three stories’ height
Parted the drapes of inner light.
I sat before twelve men whose ears
Were pinned against their hearts by fears;
The judge who filled the niche of tense,
A very rock of recompense,
Lifted his statue’s face of law

Above the prisoner doomed with awe,
When the court’s tension like a glass broke,
As the hard voice on the telephone spoke,
“I cannot listen to such pap,
Are you prepared to take the rap?”

Then I ran to a telephone booth
Το get at the number of the truth;
A bulb was burning on the air
Bald and bleary and debonair;
I riffled a thousand pages to look,
A million names were in the book;
I saw that they were all the same,
A million printings of one name;
Pillars of numbers held my eyes
Among the zeros of surmise;
I spun the number on the wheel
The combinations of the real;
The rubber mouthpiece black and foul
Stood open at a dreadful vowel,
The dial raced around and back,
A zipper slithered down time’s track;
The telephone booth began to rock
With a canoe’s motion at a dock;
The bulb blazed forth, it had begun
Drawing directly on the sun;
The booth, I saw, was the jury’s box
Empty of juries, judges, clocks;
That window’s shop, a pack of lies,
Was telescoped to a coffin’s size;

The booth, I saw, was the voting place
Everything gone except the space,
Everything gone except the mouth
In which there ground the gears of wrath,
And O it came over the telephone,
The voice that gnawed me to my bone,
“Answer the question and no claptrap,
Are you prepared to take the rap,
The basic rap, the basic rap?”