Daddy
You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. / Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time—— / Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal / And a head in the freakish Atlantic / Where it pours bean green over blue / In the waters off beautiful Nauset. / I used to pray to recover you. / Ach, du. / In the German tongue, in the Polish town / Scraped flat by the roller / Of wars, wars, wars. / But the name of the town is common. / My Polack friend / Says there are a dozen or two. / So I never could tell where you / Put your foot, your root, / I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could hardly speak. / I thought every German was you. / And the language obscene / An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. / I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew. / The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna / Are not very pure or true. / With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck / And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack / I may be a bit of a Jew. / I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— / Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through. / Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you. / You stand at the blackboard, daddy, / In the picture I have of you, / A cleft in your chin instead of your foot / But no less a devil for that, no not / Any less the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two. / I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do. / But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue. / And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look / And a love of the rack and the screw. / And I said I do, I do. / So daddy, I’m finally through. / The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through. / If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know. / Daddy, you can lie back now. / There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you / They always knew it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
