Crazy

   I believe that the torturer is as depraved by his acts as the one
   who is tortured… — Breyten Breytenbach

Last night my wife came downstairs to ask
if I was throwing a dinner party. Alone,
I was arguing with something someone said
twenty years ago, finally, responding brilliantly.
Recently, I stopped biting my nails, but still pick
at my fingers, follow the beloved faces
of my favorite dead for blocks on end.
Everyone in my family kept secrets from themselves,
such as why they all slapped themselves, repeatedly.
Uncle Jake stood at the toilet mirror, daring himself
to try it again. Grandma once slapped Mrs. Tillem
at Levy’s deli because, she cursed, God told her to.
Father slapped mostly his fate. We all talked to ourselves
so loudly no one ever heard anything anyone else ever said.
Asked why he used irony to describe a death camp,
Tadeusz Borowski said: a defense against intolerable pain,
an admission of failure. Because reality was a necessary illusion?
Once, over dinner, a friend described the indignities
done to him and others by those of his God and race;
how each night in solitary confinement there was no air to breathe,
nothing to grasp, distort, resist. For years, day after day,
he walked inside his tiny cell, chanting the names of the dead.
Why hadn’t he gone crazy, I asked. Staring into the darkness
of my being, he said, “What makes you think I didn’t?”
What’s dark in my nature is also devious. At night,
in the quiet of my cell, I practice the art of solace,
irony, and catharsis. Condone and forgive nothing,
the past reminds me, not even the obscenity of truth,
always a last slap in the face.