Human Nature

A spare, epigrammatic poem that juxtaposes Richard Nixon and Timothy Leary, arguing that despite personal preference for one over the other, both ultimately reduce to the same impulse toward control.

A short, plain-spoken verdict that pairs two opposed 1960s figures - 'Riehard Nixon' and 'fim Leary' - and collapses their difference. The speaker has 'person to warrent / and letter / heard from / them both,' admits 'I don't like one / I like the other,' and then dissolves the preference: 'when it comes / to eontrol / there is no differanee / From former to later.' The title, 'Human Nature,' generalizes the indictment beyond either man to the appetite they share.

The poem's brevity is its method: by giving Nixon and Leary the same handful of cramped lines it formally enforces the equivalence it argues for. The honest admission of personal preference ('I like the other') is what makes the leveling sting - liking and disliking turn out to be irrelevant once 'eontrol' is the measure, so the poem refuses the comfort of choosing sides between establishment and counterculture. The closing phrase 'From former to later' flattens chronology and party alike into a single human constant, which the title names as 'nature' rather than politics. The OCR keeps misspellings ('warrent,' 'eontrol,' 'differanee'); I preserve them, and the compressed argument reads clearly through them.