Searching for Answers with a Conservative Past

Searching for answers the poet visits his past:
browsing through his old journals from the Reagan Era...
he takes a moment to snicker at the thought
of Tony Kurshner's Hitler and his wife,
Himmler, omnipotently enticing the entire
nation to chant their Heil, "Just say No!"

The journals confess his current troubles existed even then,
the same questions that run rampant in his poetry now race across the pages in his hands
their endless unanswered marathon an anthem to his life:

Why after 10 years are the same questions
riddling his mind - still producing no solution?
Why does he always end at the same beginning
with no sense of competition?
What catastrophe must occur for self-redemption to set him free?

Even his victimatic poetry copiously
searches for these answers, but in vain.

The true frustration results in the acknowledgment
of his troubles and his inability to solve them.

The poet closes his old testament
and with this bible between his hands
he prays for an enlightened future,
where years from now he can revisit
this poem and script an answer.

27 August 97
dsl