DANIEL E. BLACKSTON
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"Kaddish for Bobby Fischer"

Daniel E. Blackston
                                                                         Kaddish for Bobby Fischer

"To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else it will feed my revenge." 
-- The Merchant of Venice 3.1.45-46. 


Master made in Manhattan. A bastard self-sworn
to win and forfeit the world. Sly riddler
of sixty-four squares, he reeled down L-shaped
stairs in nightmares, smashing knights, skewering queens

in wooden wars where nothing knew how to bleed.
Nazis, Russians, Jews -- cat-burglars of his psyche --
wired his Holocaust in sanity's fall. 
He spite-checked dawn, stalemated in loneliness. 

Russian-rigged matches taught him to thwart all draws,
shrug-off a billion dollars, combust alone.
"The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark...."
Make no mistake: this game is against God.

It started with a child's dream of victory.
His heart, fast-forwarding always to gold,
a pole-vault past plodding school-days,
his jet-age gambit-of-the-mind: forever

scheming combinations to the rainbow's end.
Decades later, his comic books tattered,
his costly safes drilled open, mother dead,
a taste for gold piqued his Icelandic sleep.

Emptied of sacrifice, on his deathbed
he dreamed a horse-headed god, circumcised
angels; died with a one-eighty IQ
and guts full of Sushi. His last photo showed

bile, beard, and filling-less teeth.
Had he no feelings? Only long grudges
against races and nations? The "Hitler
of Chess" -- himself born to Jews -- broken, lost

and God, too, broken and lost, the rainbow
shattered, every piece exchanged, returned
to its dark casket. A game's funeral?
Or the world's, with all its players losing.

                                                                                                                           


​© 2023, Daniel E. Blackston

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  • Home
  • Stone Secrets Blog
  • SERVICES
    • POETRY FEEDBACK
    • Poem Polisher
  • Blackston Bio
  • Discover
  • ESSAYS
    • Non-Local Consciousness
    • Self-Identity
    • Being and Knowing
    • ​Concerning Kandinsky
    • Existential Metaphors
    • Sylvia Plath's "Tulips"
    • Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"
    • Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
  • OCCULT & MAGICK
    • Ghost Flower
  • 7 Secrets of Poetry
  • "Kaddish"