Newspoem.

26 November 1999

Tell Me a Story

On Halloween morning as we are checking out of the Atlanta Marriot Courtyard Bobby Rabyd will tell us that the news is very bad that a plane has crashed and it happened in the new Bermuda triangle where Kennedy went down

Tell me a story about an airplane
tell me a tidy tragedy about
lives lost immaculately
no bodies to recover
from wreckage underseas

Tell me a story
about sophisiticated underwater robots
probing wreckage for clues
hundreds of feet beneath
gigantic waves

Tell me a story
about military leaders
from an exotic country
dying in what the FBI
believes may be sabotage

Tell me a story with colored graphs
detailing radio contact
the radar path
the flight recorder
the cockpit voice recorder
I want diagrams with arrows
maps and charts
showing the plane's confused
terrifying descent

Let me imagine the screams
of the passengers

Tell me a story about
cryptic religious aphorisms
muttered by a suicidal
Egyptian copilot
hire a translator
to confrim these theories
and have the FBI
probe into the background
of Egyptian military
officials

Tell me a story about
an explosion in the tail
a struggle in the cockpit
a technical malfunction
a psychotic Islamic
and tell me that
no bodies were recovered
intact

Let me think about that

And please tell it slowly
for there are so many other
stories I would rather not
read

 


Newspoetry at Spineless Books