THEN AND NOW

Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
T.S. Eliot

World War II top-secret interrogations at Fort Hunt,
with my bishop fianchettoed on a long attack,
his sweeping powers projected along the diagonal,
a hypermodern strategy, remote influence of the center,
the Nazi General and I sit engaged across the chessboard,
while I patiently cut the keys to his secrets.

Cold War sensory deprivation studies
at universities funded by CIA interests:
Hebb’s students goggled and muffled in pleasant rooms soon disorganize into hallucinations and psychosis, and Cameron’s depatterned post-partum depression
—what bladder control, what baby?—
returns home babbling to the care of her mother, while the rest of the
Canadian Nine fare little better.
What invisible tool now in the hands of the interrogator
to drill out the rivets of a human mind,
the architecture tumbling, in rubble, fully regressed,
now compliant.

War on Terror, hooded into oblivion, gagged, and short-shackled, contorted in Red Army stress positions, or medieval strappado from the bars on the window—when his own straining tendons and sinews are the Prisoner’s most dreaded enemy; lying naked slopped in his cell, moaning, hot boxed into a smothering sweat or hosed into a rattling chill, then on a jet to nowhere—whose false flag with the threat of this beating? Standing, kneeling all day all night strobe lights deafening music, the schedule posted on the door of his cell; suffocating head first in the sleeping bag cinched tight, ribs snapping, then ice packed and photographed; ankles and wrists spread-eagle bound to the Khmer Rouge waterboard head down and nearly drowned, and that’s a “no-brainer” with Dick Cheney; crowbars from every angle prying loose psychic cracks and fissures; reality fractures into shards of delusion and despair, and on it goes…What false confession to live or die?

“I never laid hands on anyone; I never compromised my humanity.”