James Matles by Michael Ceraolo

From American Labor:  An Episodic Epic

James Matles

Some of you may know of Joseph Welch,

the Army attorney who,

in the idiom of the early twenty-first century,

took down McCarthy in a public hearing

You may not know,

because it was in executive session

even though I asked it to be public,

that I had also done so

in November of the previous year

There was a union-representation election

coming up in a few weeks,

                                        and

the drunken bully and his pet boy Cohn

were doing their best to influence the outcome

"When you accuse me of spying,

and when you accuse decent working people

in Lynn and Schenectady

of spying and sabotage,

you are lying, Senator McCarthy"

"You are doing a dirty thing for GE . . .,

browbeating decent working people"

Though he knew I was onto him,

he kept yammering away,

so I answered back:

"Any citizen is decent unless

he is charged, tried and found guilty of a crime,

and that applies to Communists

as well as to Republicans"

He asked me if I was a spy,

and I asked him if he was one,

and got no response

More whispering between him and his pet boy,

then I asked Cohn a question;

without any awareness of irony,

McCarthy told him he could,

in effect, take the Fifth,

and the 'hearing' ended,

                                   though, sadly,

his campaign was effective enough

to cause us to lose a close election

Bio:  "Michael Ceraolo is a retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) and a few chapbooks published (among the chapbooks is Cleveland Haiku, from Green Panda Press). He has a second full-length book, Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press, and is continually working on new and existing poetry projects.