empathy for the devil in poetry

you can look at the works
of the writer Ayn Rand and
only see the soullessness
the monstrous frothings
the bile and cruelty
because of course
they’re all there
on those pages
in the unhinged
fifty-thousand
word count
oceans of
selfish
rationalization

but it is important to remember
she was just a little kid once
she was told she was a pretty
princess and smart on top too
the upper middle class Russian
early twentieth century equiv
of a Gifted and Talented child
in nineteen eighties America
told how they were brilliant
that there were no boundries
they could be anything and
they could have everything
until the student loans
came due, of course

her upper middle class world-view
the pharmacist’s prodigy daughter
crashed down and torn apart by
revolutionaries who were sick
of being barely able to eat
while tsars gorged on caviar
and people like her sat in
less-opulent comfort yet
so so much more than that
caste system allowed them

they had learned the wrong lesson
from their suffering, in the end
that you just kill until you get
your slice of the pie and then
she learned the wrong lessons too
from the burning of her own safe
evanvescent bourgeois dreamland

and so she built up a religion
of cruelty and selfishness and
smug self-righteous detachment
in billion-syllable screeds
sold by the pound to rich
snots in ivy universities
who wanted to stay on top
of their social ladders
without having to go to
church for their excuses

and it’s a cancer now
that eats inside our culture
the myth of objectivity
the myth of superiority
the lie that there is anything
other than all being in this
beautiful awful mess together

in the past, it made me so angry
I wished I could spit on her corpse
take a hammer to her gravestone
curse her ten thousand times
for the horror she wrought
but in the end
that would be to be
just like the angry bolsheviks
who learned the wrong lesson from pain
just like the spoiled little girl
who learned the wrong lesson from pain
and we cannot be like
either of them
lest more of both
are born again

you can look at the works of
the writer Ayn Rand and
only see the evil
their damage done
but now that I’m an old man
I just see that scared child
who didn’t have anyone to
help her see that when you
suffer, the lesson isn’t
that you can never feel
that bad again no matter what
the lesson is that
no one should ever feel
that bad again no matter what

and I’m no longer angry
I’m just sad
which isn’t always helpful either
but it’s a lot less harmful
to others than being mad