They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.

In the future we might all be vegetarian,
and this life will seem barbaric the way
a corset was or eugenics. We might look
at this man being secretly recorded, bragging,
They killed cows, I killed them, and wonder,
where was his mother? She might have spoken
of his childhood, how it was poor but decent,
how like that blue god’s mother she too gaped
into her son’s wide gob and saw the universe
once. Or she might have told the story of how
he was led astray by a band of men in uniforms.
Not brownshirts but pleated brownshorts
in which they practiced ideological calisthenics.
How she’s been standing at the crater’s edge
saying, Here, kitty kitty kitty, ever since.

Because this man, her son in the undershirt,
dear cadre, cow vigilante, he’s no gladiolus.
He sighs. Even his mustache is pusillanimous.
Maybe he was a Romeo in school. Maybe
he wields this stick to reclaim what he misses
most about his body, or maybe it’s always been
his dream to squeeze the messy limbs of this country
into a svelte operatic shriek. The camera gives us
a glimpse of his chin dumpling. He will go to jail
a thousand times without passing go, without
stopping to plant a tree or collect clean underwear.
He admits it was wrong to allow his boys to record
the killing. Jai Shri Ram. Silly to leave evidence
behind, even though they always go free,
even though the young lads enjoy it so.

And Qasim? The man they killed,
the green meadow of his life come to this,
didn’t his mother also once confuse the dirt
in his mouth for a galaxy? Didn’t he believe
a dying man had the right to ask for water?
In the future when people complain about how Gandhi
should have made a comeback, when comparisons
are drawn between YouTube and the Upanishads,
will they notice the bystanders in the frame,
their shabby shoes shuffling like lapwings
around the bloody censored blur of Qasim’s body?
Will they speak of the difficulty of watching him
thrash around for an invisible rope to steady
him home, the difficulty of us watching them
watching him being killed?

Or is that an illusion too? The way a magician
might swirl his cape to reveal his assistant
is really a robot. No damage done here, folks!
The way we enter the rooms of our past
like gunshots to say, Surprise, I’m still here.
No point carrying blossoms in your pocket
instead of a meat sandwich. Because even if
you did not walk the earth exultantly, even if
you avoided disposable plates and mourned
every glacier and strung a lattice of pearls
to the giant monument of love, there might still
come a day when you are hauling refrigerators
on a truck, or taking the children to a fair,
and when death arrives you must let him
strap you to a telephone pole, you must look
into his ten-headed face, and say,  Flay, brother, flay.