PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Some camp commandents did not actively participate
in their staffs' amusements. You remember the first
one you witnessed (they always said, you never forget
the first time, or the last; just all the Schlemeils in between).
You had just been promoted to command; some said
you had been recommended by Himmler himself, but you
preferred to think you achieved that rank by hard work,
supervisory discretion, and loyalty to Volk, Reich, and Party.
Just days after you had been installed---it was a kind of
initiation: two adolescent Dutch boys, long-haired blondes,
slender and lithe, their manners very feminine;
lovers of poetry and atonal music, and very queer for each other.
Secretly, you would have admitted their extraordinarily
exquisite beauty. But in the war for the honor of Deutschland
(sing it loud, "Deutschland, Deutschand, uber alles . . ."),
the superiority of the Aryan people, and the extermination
of both internal and external enemies of Das Dritte Reich,
none of the gang of conspirators---the communists, the slavs,
the homosexuals, the international bankers, those Jews,
and all those sons of bitches behind that bloodsucking Treaty---
could not expect any sort of clemency; not in a state of war
for the very life of the Volk the Fuhrer had envisioned and promised.
The boys were brought out together, and tortured in each
other's sight (until they eyes were put out) and sound (of screams):
their fingers were broken, their toes smashed; then the emasculations,
with the severed parts stuffed into each other's mouth;
and then they bled to death all over the ground.
The last was that subversive, Yitzhak Kleinekopf
(an alias certainly, but no one, by that time, really knew details;
just like they never knew how exactly, the Fuhrer died---
heroically directing the defense of Berlin and the Chancellory.
This old, cabaret comic had relentlessly mocked the Fuhrer
from the days of the Beer Hall Putsch until the very hour
that he was betrayed after years of long hiding
right under the Gestapo's beaks. And so he was crucified---
which the Reichskirche would have forgiven had it survived---
and you kept watch beside him through his prolonged suffering;
taking your meals and beverages of refreshment in front
of his distended eyes. He required a bit more time to die
than the boys; but the process of crucifixion is a lot slower,
although more efficient, and not subject to human errors,
and altogether less labor-intensive than other tortures.

Paraguay was very welcoming, and accommodating, to you;
you dwelled there a long time---two decades---undiscovered;
mourning the shattered dream of the thousand year Reich;
remembering, reminding yourself of every detail of, those incidents,
because you never forget the first and last times.

Paradise rejected you just moments after your death.

Perdition did not accommodate itself to you at all, reminding you---

with every flow of the most insidiously indescribable agonies---that
the first time is the last time is eternal and everlasting.

How long that agitator lingered on the makeshift cross . . .

How those two gorgeous boys so ardently loved each other . . .