The Specter Ayn Rand Shivers

The specter Ayn Rand shivers

Over her pendulous pulpit

With haunted, shuddering eyes

In a mouth agape with her Word

Rows of teeth, like pews or headstones,

Swim forward, scrabbling over

Each other as they surface

Through her gum and maw

Each a greyed and decaying seeker

Independent and detached of her jawbone

These are her seeds that she sprays

In a hypnotic pollination that preys

Upon the wet-minded and dissolute

She is her own foretold apocalypse:

Ayn the coiled, ticking dial

Ayn the lunacy with its twin macabre genius

Which we wish only to jail and deny

Ayn the useless rogue demon

Fraught with the failure of her own

Glacial alienation

Oh, some will inevitably circle her trap

Like fruit flies ‘round a sweet compost heap

Attracted because they smell themselves

But her philosophy erodes itself in its own fantasy

Like an ant, which can hold up to fifty times

Its own weight, then made big and crushed

Under its own frame

For its seeming strength

Is in actuality

Its own most

Debilitating vulnerability

Ayn the isolated tower

Ayn the disfigured wraith

Babbling fishhooks for the worms

Ayn the Ouroboros

Eater of her own feces

The specter Ayn Rand shivers

Behind the mirror

The specter Ayn Rand shivers

Long and on and on

(note: this poem was a reaction to an old 60 minutes interview with mike wallace and our subject. i wasn't planning on writing an indictment of her or her philosophy, it just sort of happened. in all fairness, i haven't even read her work, nor am i all that familiar with the details therein. i'm only aware of what's generally known about her books, and what she told us in this interview. this was a reaction to her presence in that particular interview.)