History,

with your identical cuts of meat, your one war
that keeps bubbling like sulfur in champagne,
you speak in placards and keep the details
under glass. When I asked why doughboys
wore masks soaked in urine, you penciled
arrows on a map. When I asked for a headcount
of Dahmer's freezer, you gave me a smiley
face stamp and a figure I can't remember,
which is the first trouble with you. You never
touch me anymore, which is another. Crank
the Victrola. Tell me of the nervous castratos,
the cleared landscape to which they arrived.
Better, recount the Great Boston Molasses
Disaster, how the workers were drowned
in brown syrup then fished out days later,
eyes and lungs candied. Any rarity will do:
a winning-side war criminal, a bugle no one
blew. The lack of mutation is also troublesome,
history. Staircases haven't changed in years,
neither has lingerie. Every prison's the same
locus of motives. You glomp into textbooks
like gruel into a bucket. Fair warning: when
science finally perfects the beautiful turnback time
machine, I plan to surrealify wherever possible.
Go back and invent fireworks early, Enron
an almanac -- a sort of clandestine campaign
of studious entropy. Did Genghis Khan
grow up kittenless? I'll tabby that Mongol.
I'll find some cavemen still counting their dirty
fingers in the dark and teach them baseball,
convince the pesky 5th dentist to recommend
Trident, string up Christmas lights at the first
Christmas and tell Jesus you only live once.

(First published in The Sycamore Review)