Dr. Seuss trees are native to this region
But the indigenous in caves put the curse on anyway,
Even the flightless cormorants -- whose babies are black
Or ash-grey, poking at blue necks with beaks like pliers.
Sea lions dance in what once was the Kumeyaay land of holes,
The sacred portals of birth, where kayakers now joust
For an inside view but keep their distance, as the seals
Spin and laugh at them, blow out fountains of brine.
Horizongoers wander onto the spit of guano to take selfies
As pelicans swallow. There is a stair through the red rock, film-noir dim
On wet wooden planks 144 steps down to an elven face outlined
Like a magic jigsaw door in granite otherwise endless …
But the only things endless now are the Soviet Realism campus halls,
Where neural circuits go to be reprogrammed and
A brutalist spaceship holds the records for the best and brightest
With working apps and scalable plans by their senior year
Or they bring shame upon their D&D encounters and families;
Others more realistic think the beach with the purple trees is the place to be
Homeless or a permanent student, though even they have given up
On new knowledge as all the subfiles have piled up.
Yet if there's one who knows there were bones here from
38,000 years ago you would never know it, from their etiquette.
That's what academics are like, as proud of their ignorance
As desperate for others who are as smart as them
But it's less than 1% of the population even attempt to get in
This prison of the children's book, about an equal percentage
As the landmass of Maine is apportioned, or better yet, what no one says
The Universe itself peoples in much smaller fractions.
