When did I become
so hardened to human suffering?
Who is this monster I do not recognize,
who can sit in front of a T.V.
watching a war
as though it were a mini-series?
Who taught me this trick
of accepting the destruction of 200,000 people
in the blinking of an eye?
When did I learn to look at babies—
with bloated stomachs
crawling with flies,
starving to death in countries
with names I cannot pronounce—
as though they have nothing to do with me?
Who is this creature I cannot abide:
who would sooner part with his humanity
than with his cash;
who can dismiss all of the homeless
with a backward flick of the wrist—
the way Pontius Pilate dismissed a barefooted rebel
dressed in rags—
like so much rubbish,
too despicable to be touched
with his clean Roman hands.
—From North’s chapbook, Terminally Human (Finishing
Line Press, 2013)
—Previously published in Blue Lake Review (March 2013), and
Ancient Paths Literary Magazine, Issue 15
is a sixty-eight-year-old retired refrigeration mechanic. Since his retirement in
2007, he has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, won the 2010 A.E. Coppard
Prize for Fiction, and more recently, won Honorable Mention in the 2011 Allen Ginsberg
Poetry Awards. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paterson Literary
Review, Slipstream, The Dos Passos Review, and other journals.
He has published two chapbooks: Along the Highway, a fiction chapbook,
was published by White Eagle Coffee Store Press in 2010; and his first chapbook
of poems, Terminally Human, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press.
For more information, visit his website,
www.barrynorth.org.