Parable in Praise of Violence

By Tony Barnstone Tony Barnstone

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.”
—H. Rap Brown, former Black Panther justice minister

Thanks for the violence. Thanks for Walt’s rude muscle

pushing through the grass, for tiny Gulliver crushed

between the giant’s breasts. Thanks for Moby’s triangular hump

and Ahab’s castrated leg. Thanks for the harpoons.

Thanks for this PBS history of the automatic pistol.

The good machine is simple, few moving parts,

an efficiency of what’s preserved and what is wasted,

so with each shot the recoil cocks the gun to shoot again,

then recoil, cock and shoot again, recoil, cock,

and so on till the target buys it, or your ammo’s spent.

Thanks for the poem, which is really a little pistol:

load and cock, point and aim, then the trigger,

the hammer, the powder, the discharge, the bullet,

the target, the recoil, the crime. No smoking gun,

just ballistics, caliber, powder marks, the question why.

My life is like a loaded gun, and when I aim it at you

I hope to take off the top of your head,

no safety on, no playing nice, just the spark,

the flash, the damage, just red American

cherry pie violence. So, thank you

for the harpoon gun we aim at God and death

and all the unknown world, and for the spear-stuck beast,

rope ripping through torn hands, for what

refuses to be caught and what we fathom only by

riding the whale down into the deep, refusing to let go.

Source: The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008)

Biography

The son of poet and translator Willis Barnstone and visual artist Elli Barnstone, Tony Barnstone was born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Indiana, Vermont, and Spain. He was educated at Wesleyan University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD under poets Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass.

A poet, translator, editor, and writer of fiction, Barnstone . . .

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