She walks through the rib-cage of academia
furioso with scribbles of vengeance
to right the inherent thrust of his argument
towards more appetites, less longings—
her spiderman backpack keeps inconvenient theories
of the origins of life and Dewey decimal system
from the triple zero stacks of the library,
the bibliographies of bibliographies.
There's a human at the end of her walk
perhaps with a cigarette, a leering cravat,
to disabuse her of her inhumanity
with predictable frailty, the listing for nuance
a sock to the jaw that no ipso facto gets back.
She's a student, so she doesn't have questions
just solutions, explanations, equivocations
for her interlocutor tired of the sermons,
the dotting of I's with the unexamined outside
like light through the stained glass arches
that can't stay away, merely yellow with intent.
The stacks hold illumitable manuscripts
and the bathrooms have porn cartoons,
these students change less that the texts, he found,
refusing to be subsumed - as the masters
in the monasteries before them refused,
changing words to the New Testament
countless times as it suited their status
as keepers of useless knowledge.
"Paint your own thing," the Buddhist priest said
to the art preservationist unable to reconstruct
what had dripped over time to the bowl in the earth
as if it had no better thing to do.
The lost is collected and stuffed into pipes
and blurred with prescriptions of unending night.
The cast of the play may wear pantsuits this season
and speak with the patois of dragonskinned gangs
but the story's the same
as every tale in every time,
predictable as a lawnmower,
frogthroat confusion dissected with prongs
for a sharp microscopic confusion,
called perplexity, tensegrity, high irony,
ambiguity, game or chaos theory, the ineluctable
pushing on the string, the drawing and quartering
of hairs, the splitting of straws,
the quibbling to bend the unknowable to dough
to begin again,
as if our own time
could rhyme with medieval,
as if we had ever stopped thinking that way,
as if these ideas weren't hospital curtains
to give privacy rights to our shame
—the ethereal is too real
we must track formulations
like blood on a dress
for clues to the murder of a hero
who never existed
except as we've re-created him
from cardboard and twine
and jealousy toward the divine.
Humanitas and its irrefutable reason,
Scientia and its endless capriciousness,
in this place where the adversarial truths lay hidden
under a thousand paving stones
—until the blocks themselves can't be truthful,
they must hold on to each others' sides
in hopes that the jewel long analyzed
will one day form.
In parlors of the night
hawks strum their talons
until the new light
makes the squirrel tails like rats',
waiting for the bleed of distant mercy
in a world where pride makes protection fact.
The creatures scurry to their dens
to don their robes and stroke their pipes,
the fires all aligned as if to symbolize,
then the stoking of the trivializing leaf.
The dancers will leap,
the ashes will keep.
The burn of censors
twirling round the pit
we have all jumped into from this.
