Bet His Ears Are Burning

It turned up at last! I'm not sure if it can be genuine but it at least shows that it was a climber's ice-pick rather than the weedy thing for cracking cocktail ice.

Piolet

A friend of mine once claimed,
he owned the ice-pick
that killed Trotsky,
the one that made his ears burn.

We are not clear today
how this man died.
Was it by an axe,
a shining metal instrument
that rang on contact
with the skull
and sank into museums
with the blood still on it?

Or maybe, less heroically,
it was a weedy chisel,
for breaking cocktail ice,
plunged easily between the eyes
to tap the Marxist theory,
the humanist computer
sucking all humanity
to Mercader and SMERSH.

A small and deadly incident,
in Mexico,
became an end of history,
a little termination
where all events must merge
and separate again.

The ice-pick floated north,
and in the hands of Dr. Freeman
cut the nerves of Communists,
with twenty-second,
“transorbitals”,
an afternoon of terror
at the hands of madmen
made to cure the sane
and different.