a sign on the Black Forest Highway states
as little men with shouldered picks scurry
behind a curvy girl who must be Schneewittchen:
“Snow White.” Insensitive? Possibly—
yet an improvement on ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
Watch for Dwarfs could have helped me
when, after a long day of Freud and Jung
at USC, I checked my mirror, backed out
of my parking space, heard a screech, then saw
a motorized wheelchair whip from my wake,
a raging Rumpelstiltskin at the helm.
“Watch where you’re going, cocksucker son
of a bitch!” he shrieked by way of introduction.
He had more on his mind, and voiced it
as I yelled, “Sorry,” and burned away
too fast, I hoped, for him to read my license plate.
On campus, most wheelchairs flew tall red
warning flags to cross the automotive seas.
But why should the differently abled
make things easier for me? How dare I think,
“That goblin could have wrecked my life”—
my academic galleon dashed on the reefs
of lawsuits, jail, bankruptcy,
my high and gleaming aspirations sunk?
I should have felt guilty. Instead, like the time
I shoplifted Fanny Hill, then hid (I swear)
in a doghouse while juvie hall, parental vengeance,
and eternal embarrassment banged by,
I felt blessed in my escape. When, years
later, Dr. Lichtman pulled from between
my wife’s gory thighs a tiny, orange
humanoid—point-headed, fish-slippery—
I asked, shaking with dread, “Is he a dwarf?”
As if that raging little man had finally found,
and taken his revenge on me.