Cupertino

This child, by love, grew heavy with self
To bludgeon others, and boil under pressure.
His parents knew his power and fell to serve him;
Greased his rails and raised a locomotive
That Dreyfuss might have streamlined.

Steam built and flanges gripped.  Late they resisted,
But as pennies on the rail resist.
He flattened them into mementos of his coming upon the world.

He whistled.  A high note, shrill.  An evangelistic pitch.
John the Baptist without humility,
Not from the wilderness but through it
Like a steel stab through flesh.

The multitudes came, and he was full of bearings
That he gave to the throng like orders, like blows,
And they received his hardness like bread, like water
And worshipped him and the wounds he gave them.

Lovely stigmata, blessed touch.
As lepers they received of him.
And though it was but Hal and sham
It was more certain than they,
So that they loved and sang:
Was it not piercing?

And I say nolo contendere.
I would not lay my neck across such tracks
To have the Atcheson, Topeka and The Salome
Sling that child of chrome down the line.