i
From black and white boxes
he instructed us. ‘Life’s
key intellectual decision:
Are we here for a purpose?'
The purpose he offered was
The Party. One idea ruling,
all diversity obliterated.
Where his heart lay none knew.
This flame, tended by a few,
grew.
ii
Shabbily suited, bitter pill,
Leo, pacing back and forth
in the apartment above mine.
The rest of us furnish homes
with Party plates and medals.
Buying bread in the market,
‘The Party is mother and father,’
an activist ponderously calls.
Leo gobs at him. I hurry him off.
iii
Smoke rises bluely from fields.
Men setting out to investigate
are turned away. Over time,
boundaries grow comfortable.
‘The Party’s a formula,’ Leo says,
'a superficial sum, its calculations
all wrong. Still, we live by them,
hurt by them, do not know why.’
'You could get arrested,' I say.
iv
I fall for a conventional woman,
a Party professor, well versed
in its law. I know what we have
isn't true, between her thighs
find a kind of peace. ‘You're
diminishing,’ Leo tells me daily.
‘You don’t look so good yourself.’
'The Party's a collective failure of
nerve,' he says. Sudden disquiet.
v
Tramping hard pavement, afraid
to fall. Shifting a stone in my life
might topple the whole edifice.
One night they call for me, ask
about Leo. Afterwards, fearful,
I meet him. His face is cracked
lines and broken light. ‘Thomas,’
he says, ‘you’re a good man.’
Sharing a cigarette together,
blunt twigs tapping the glass,
he repeats it: ‘A good man.’
