Johannes and his Broom

Poets, professors and lawyers
With their codewords and narrow precedents:
The lure of gamesmanship,
The competition's death
So easily make the truth irrelevant,
For the mind is made to spin, not to resolve,
All thought is naked, needing different clothes,
And words, forced to communicate,
Give only what a prisoner volunteers:
A name, a rank, a label for the files.

Why do I spend any time
With the impoverished
Scraping the mines of calcified thoughts,
To seek some scarcer crystal
For collections in children's rooms
When the darkness all around us
Lives through it, where it is?