PROZAC FOR HUMANITY

 

ROBERT MARGETTS

PROZAC FOR HUMANITY

 I’m an old tired man now,

Counting decades on my right hand

the way a gambler fans his cards

at a blackjack table in Las Vegas.

And I’ve had time to think

too much time,

maybe or perhaps not,

about the way the world

might’ve turned if Prozac

had been around a hundred years ago.

Back then,

psychiatry was a whisper behind a door,

not something a man could admit he needed.

And I sometimes wonder

how different the maps,

the speeches,

the wars,

the tyrants might have been

if a few pills had softened

the edges of the wrong men.

Stalin, Hitler, Sadam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad

Just to mention a few.

Now, don’t mistake me

I never claimed to be a psychologist.

Hell, I barely claim to understand myself.

But I’ve lived long enough to know this:

some people can be helped,

and a small,

stubborn few never will be.

Folks protest that idea,

call it barbaric,

but I ask them plainly

were the monsters of history insane,

or just men who chose cruelty

with both hands open?

How do you measure madness

in a single man,

or in the mob that marches behind him?

How do you medicate a destiny

carved from arrogance,

ignorance, or the slow rot of power?

I’ve seen enough to know this much,

all the pills in the world

wouldn’t have changed

the course of those men.

Some are born twisted.

Others learn it step by step,

choice by choice,

until evil becomes as natural as breathing.

And here I sit,

an old Texan man on a quiet porch,

watching the sun go down,

thinking about the world we inherited

and the one we might’ve had

if human nature were easier to fix.

 

 

 

ROBERT MARGETTS

WHAT DOES THIS POEM MEAN?

It’s a poem about a man who has lived long enough to stop believing in easy answers.