Me and Peter Lorre Down by the Schoolyard

Me and my sidekick, we're both pederasts. Like you.

We're both in love with the girls, non-Jews.

Ja, ja, we dress in our mother's nightgown,

we hang all the way around, Hungarians in ruin.

Know us, our terrible noses, our clown makeup:

we have no papers. We crawled out of the rat-hole.

Like you, we wear our difference about our necks, blind as a fox stole,

its glass teeth, its yellowed eye. The little girls, they cry. Like I.

Please, policeman, heed our crime: ink the territory

like a six-sided star around where we broke the kid from her line.

They keep a record of each beggar, the names in a ledger,

and later you'll know the clove of our hoof. So clever.

Kindermurder--it sounds sweet as a game and we want food.

We've got a toy ferris wheel full of knives, we smear

our mouths into sugary smiles, then brandy, then into gash.

A tubercular rag, you've caught our rash, the balloon-man

making nein, one girl stuck in the telephone wires.

Lifting higher. We take them from their candy,

we take their names. Like you, they are never the same.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2003
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