This was written in 1971 when i was working as a sports reporter for The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York. i was a champion of traditional (and the right way to write a news story as taught to me by “Coach” JB Leftwich at Castle Heights and Fred Russell at The Nashville Banner). A young and new reporter wrote the story about a man who had epilepsy and struggling had committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of the Watertown YMCA.

i was irate at the article because it violated the rules that were my bible for print journalism. When i complained, my great friend John B. Johnson pulled me aside and calmed me down. He was right, of course. i was out of line. When i got home that afternoon, i sat down and wrote this:

no one heard
his epileptic call of delight;
later, no one would even know
the crass and un-smiled-upon disease
had crashed his brain
as he leaped
from his fifth floor room window
with that call of delight
but
his mind raced onward
into the ecstasy of madness
as he dwindled toward oblivion
but yet,
not quite oblivion
as his wish for recognition
would also be buried
amidst the headline of
“Man Killed In Fall Out of Window;”
even his name was plummeted
into the obscurity of
second paragraphville;
his falling from grace, even in his delight
from the YMCA’s fifth floor,
past the gym of happiness
and
showers of cleanliness
against the cobbler’s sign
(which should have been symbolic
but
even that as coincidental)
onto
“the concrete of the sidewalk below”
according to the newspaper reporter,
but
did little to shatter
the stillness of early morning when
the milkman continued to drop his bottles on the doorsteps
and
the bicycled paperboys thudded their paper missiles
against the walls of the porches
long before the sun rose
to meet the day,
refusing to yet relent
to storms of winter;
the elevator even disregarded
the sacrifice of delight,
carefully coasting down and up
under the auspices of the new elevator man
whose name no one knew
and
who would move into the YMCA the next day
so he, that man whom epilepsy had possessed
to end it all with a yell of delight
passed on
in his fit;
not one soul, not even the newspaper reporter,
acknowledged
it was the disease of Caesar.