Interview Intervention

It's catch 22. The poem is about an interview with a social worker type and the strange bid to portray oneself as just crazy enough to get benefits without being too crazy to get locked up. But the reader is left to surmise this from the opening lines "you are going to an interview / to prove you are crazy." But the poem ends with gesture of refusal:

in a small room
    your inquisitor sits:
he serves up death
    like lemonade
perhaps you will forget
        to be crazy after all
;perhaps you will hand back
the lemonade with ice-cubes
  & ask him to drink.

Gwen Hauser. "The Interview" in May 1977 issue of Germination

And the placement of that semi-colon adds the appropriate touch of craziness.

And so for day 939
09.07.2009