Note from Joe: Last week’s poem by Ogden Nash surprised everybody with its serious tone. Here’s another surprise from Nash.
There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent shout
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”
That solitary prisoner
Will never hear reply.
No comrade in eternity
Can hear the frantic cry.
No heart can share the terror
That haunts his monstrous dark.
The light that filters through the chinks
No other eye can mark.
When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull.
Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.
We’d free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.