introducing me

well boss

here i am

trapped in the body

of an insignificant

insect

paying for

sins of a past life

 

i am

bernie the cockroach

at your service

cousin twice removed

of archy

whose fame

if not fortune

grew when he found

an old typewriter

and jumped

key to key

to express his soul

 

bernie

my cousin complained

fame has its price

he told me

moving the carriage return

near killed him

all over again

the shift key was

out of the question

so was

the question mark

 

a question

do you humans know

how good life is

with a personal computer

question mark

when i saw the enter key

i almost cried

computers put

the me in media

 

poor archy

will never know

 

so boss

i predict

in the next generation

an explosion

of writing insects

with computers

and links to the web

pot-boiler ants

spy-thriller wasps

butterfly novelists

and especially

spider poets

 

as for your humble cockroach

family

the main thing

that worried archy

was whether the stuff he wrote

was literature

or not

 

it was

enough for a book

or several

in his next life

he became a poet again

and settled in marakesh

 

i on the other hand

am here

here is why

 

in my previous

human life

i saw the century pass

i saw explosions

like rockets

that took us to the moon

and bombs

that brought us back

down to earth

 

my brain exploded too

i became a ghostwriter

selling words to people of means

to use as they pleased

i auctioned my soul

to bandits who paid me

to justify any

thing

genocide

homicide

even pesticide

 

when i died

from a heart attack

if you must know

i can t say i was sorry

 

i am now

a low life form

with an even lower

profession

 

i am bernie

ghostwriter

re

incarnate

cockroach

re

dux

transmigrated

transmogrified

slam-dunked

into the evolutionary commode

to use a euphemism

 

i am so low

in fact

only one thing lower

is

the newspaper

 

boss it s me

bernie the cockroach

media critic

 

              —bernie