Mr. Dickens Almost Goes to Washington

Mr. Dickens Almost Goes to Washington

I dreamt that Marley’s ghost 

had come to Washington
in his grave clothes, pulling his 

account books,

money boxes and chains

across the cold Atlantic,

stumbling up the Capitol steps,

a staring corpse messenger groaning,

clanking, sent to cry out loud enough

to wake the dead conscience  
pickling in its

golden green brine.

Scrooge was playing troglodyte chess

with rocks and clubs in the marbled halls.

He never stopped speaking as the chains
wrapped across his aureate, vibrating throat. 
When the Ghosts of Cataclysm Present

and Future showed him Ignorance,

and Want; his own face in the mirror 

of poverty, his own feet running 

in the stampeding chaos just outside his 

triple latched door,
his hundred million silent children,

he knew his lines by heart:

"Are there no prisons?

Are there no workhouses?"

I woke up alone,

looking back at the dark

chambers where Scrooge,

not Marley, not the Ghosts

nor Dickens himself,

sat writing the ending.

July 2011

posted for  Open Link Night  at dVerse Poets Pub 

Image: Ignorance and Want, woodcut illustration from  
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens,

John Leech [Public domain], via wikimedia commons