You had a fruit gun I saw, and thought you'd got it the usual way: From night-classes, or the NRA – There's licensure for these things. And try As I might, you'd sight somewhere among the passers-by – I could not stop you – and shoot one, A boy, a man in a suit, one Tired housewife with her box of lye: It didn't matter To you in your school bell-tower, Ambusher of naiveté – Oh, you were a cute one, Laughing over its clatter-clatter With your laugh that seemed like a cry, Not shooting banana or even papay- A, though that might have at least made sense: We could all use more potassium, zinc, iron. But you'd found a Forbidden Fruit-gun, And at your feet, as on display, The dark, pulp-rotting fruit, dense And sweet, purple-grey Where long-ago bites had taken a piece away – Shoot one, and watch them scatter. From their sin – you, mad as a hatter And none of your headlong victims were as tense, None thought you more a brute – none Wished more for the screaming peace of a siren Than I. But what could I say? Come off it, sad tyrant? Lay your black vengeance aside – let it be you and I, And if we should die Alone in this, let it be nothing of consequence – You, with your Whitman, your Bible, your Byron At your poor defense. You, clutching your fruit-gun, Know that we have no more certainty than they And are as much a product our environs.